We are safe and sound back in Chiang Mai from our five day adventure in the Pai-Soppong region! Not without a minor incident. I'll get to that..
Our first night we drove our motorcycles around a national park enjoying some beautiful scenery. That evening left us in the middle of nowhere, so we stopped our bikes to ask for directions to a place we could lay our heads. I mimed this to a woman who got a huge kick out of the whole production. She made some phone calls and refused to let us go without drinking some mystery tea and waiting for some guy to show up. He apparently knew something we needed to know. Turned out that this man (who showed up on a moped) was the local help for an amazing cabin resort on the top of a mountain. We followed him up a gravel path that had me down shifting like crazy..then stalling out. I swear it was a 75 degree slope. At the top he showed us an AMAZING cabin made from teak and bamboo, on stilts, overlooking a jungle valley. Not a single other person was staying at this place, and we struck a hard bargain..10 dollars a night, with delivery of two beers. Before drinking our beers we took a little 'jungle walk'. It was getting dark, and as I was very intently studying a bug on the ground, Nathan grabbed me and pointed to a spot about 100 yards away in the jungle where it appeared that a tiger was crashing through banana trees directly for us. So loud, and so fast..Nathan calmly said "I think we might want to be more concerned about whatever THAT is." We double timed it back to the cabin, where we did battle with a bumble bee the size of my fist for about thirty minutes before being able to relax on the porch. The bee had some kind of power tool extension on its stinger because when we tried hiding inside the cabin with the porch light off in hopes that it would fly away..it instead started drilling through our bamboo walls. It wasn't the Buddhist thing to do, but we managed to squeeze the life out of it eventually.
Day two of our trip was rainy. I took my motorcycle safety class recently enough to know that it was going to be slick on the roads, and this had me nervous because the road between Mae Rim and Pai supposedly has 762 curves. Its incredibly fun to ride on..but when wet, very dangerous.
Nathan was riding in front of me when he heard the sound of metal digging violently into pavement. My back tire hit a raised spot in the road just as I was taking a corner and slid out from under me at about 15-20 miles an hour. The absolute best outcome when having a motorcycle accident on a slippery, cliff-side, blind corner road was what resulted. I was able to hold on to the bike enough to correct away from the edge of the mountain. It slid about 15 feet on me, then under me into the middle of the road. I quickly got myself up and moved the bike onto the shoulder. I realized the bag of strawberries I'd been carrying in the little front basket had flown out during the crash and strawberries were all over the road. When Nathan arrived on the scene after quickly turning around and riding back, I was picking strawberries off the ground and laughing in shock. "Did you SEE that? Ha..wow" is what I believe I said. Nathan's eyes were huge and he probably thought I was insane because I was acting like things were perfectly normal..like I'd accidentally dropped some strawberries and stopped to pick them up. The 15 foot scrape in the pavement gave me away...as did the burn marks on my pants and jacket. I lost a little skin, and have some bruises..but other than that I am fit as a fiddle. We rode our bikes another 60 km that day and arrived in Pai.
Pai is cheap, beautiful, and filled with people who can't bring themselves to leave Thailand. I would highly recommend it to everyone I know. We took a day trip to explore some caves and visited a few hot springs. My favorite hot spring was one where they sold you 4 eggs for 25 Baht (almost a dollar) and you put them on a bamboo stick to soak them in the hot spring for 20 minutes for a snack.
For those who might like to visit Pai..we stayed in the Mountain View Backpackers bungalow..200 Baht a night for a cabin, 100 for a tent. Best price in Pai, though you need a bike to get into the mountains. No reservations taken and you stay as long as you want.
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