Chiang Mai to Pai….and our last days in Thailand and Happy Birthday Earl!

Up until a week ago, I would have considered myself a pretty good hostess.  My mom taught me well and I know the basics – make sure someone has a drink in their hand as soon as they arrive for a party or dinner, make them feel at home if they are a houseguest, nice and neat and clean place to sleep, tell them to help themselves to anything they need or want, show them around if they are from out of town, etc.  However, after a week at Margaret and Harry’s, it’s clear I have no idea what to do. I’d give myself a mediocre rating at best.

First of all, Margaret and Harry didn’t know us from Adam.  Seriously.  We met Margaret’s brother Martin and his new bride Sue on our very first stop of this journey on the island of Grenada at La Sagesse. When we finally got to Northern Thailand we touched base with Margaret to make sure we got a chance to meet her and Harry.  On less than 24 hours notice, she invited us (again, complete strangers) and Aunt Jo (even more of a stranger) to come and stay with them.  Upon our arrival, we were picked up at the bus station (more of a luxury than you might imagine), settled into the most comfortable of rooms in their beautiful traditional wooden Thai home, treated (???!!!) to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant (which Margaret had gleaned from blog posts would be appreciated), and were totally taken care of in every way.  Unfortunately for Jo the 5-star treatment only lasted a day as she had to head to Bangkok, but we delighted in Margaret and Harry’s hospitality for an entire week.  Travel advice and arrangements, personal tours of the local artisan factories, guided hikes up the mountainside to hidden temples, a guest cell phone for our use, chauffer service all over town, insider info on all of the best things to do and see, beautiful Thai meals and decadent Italian meals.  Our time in Chiang Mai would have been nothing close to what it was had we not had the fortune of meeting Martin and Sue.  So many thanks to Martin and Sue and Margaret and Harry (and also our feline host and hostess Coco and Chiquita who might be the sweetest cats I have met on this trip – and we all know there have been many).

gabe’s pretty wife

Legendary host and hostess aside, Chiang Mai as a city was itself a great stop – a nice break to be in one place, and an actual home at that, for a while, after 7 nights of sleeping in 7 different towns.  We also got to meet and have dinner with Jim, Noi and Monique Cohan.  Jim is the brother of our very dear family friends Kenny and Suze (at whose home we were married). Other than that we took it pretty easy, browsing markets, visiting waterfalls and hot springs, talking to local handicraft makers to try to get a prototype made for a kid’s product that Gabe and some of his friends designed, doing research and planning and suffering and worrying about the next stage of this journey (see?  it’s not all fun and games out here), and tooling around on our motorbike.  One of the highlights was a 100km loop we did to the Northwest of the city that took us to a 10-level waterfall we had practically to ourselves. We continued riding through quaint Thai agriculture villages, primary forests and jungle, up to the finale of stunning panoramic views out to Myanmar (Burma).  Chiang Mai is a  well stocked city with many of the creature comforts of a bigger metropolis, surrounded by lots of natural beauty.  A great stop indeed.  But as easy as it would have been to stay with Margaret and Harry indefinitely (and being all British and polite as they are, I am not sure they would have ever kicked us out…) the time on our Thai visas is running low and we wanted to check out the far North before we headed out of Thailand.  So yesterday we headed out in a mini-bus to Pai.

wierdest- all these dogs dressed up and pretending to sleep at the night market in chiang mai.

above chiang mai

haley holding up the quail eggs we were under-cooking in the hot spring.

gabe trying to get this guy to make a prototype.

dannnnnnnnnng

looking west to burma on a nice day

We are currently at Bueng Pai Farm, way up North near the Myanmar border.  Pai makes Santa Cruz look like Yuppie-ville.  Talk about hippie dippie.  You stand out if you don’t have dreadlocks and shave any of your body hair.  Every café is advertising wheatgrass juice or fresh fruit shakes or vegetarian menus, all the clothes for sale are of the hippie varietal, and the place is about as gorgeous as you can get.  Rice paddies stretch as far as you can see and the bowl of land in which Pai sits is surrounded by jungle covered hillsides.  The temperatures are cool’ish (not Sapa but you actually don’t mind a sweater at night) and we have a bungalow out in the rice paddies over a small lake with fish jumping, real lotus flowers growing out of the water, and meticulously cared-for grounds, down to a sweet-smelling gardenia outside our window.  While there are many waterfalls and National Parks, and temples and caves and other things to see around here, we arrived yesterday and have basically yet to leave our lakefront veranda/hammock.  This place is close to heaven.  We already plan to overstay our visas by 3 days and I am beginning to wonder if it will only be 3 days.  Not really, though. We fly out on September 1 to get our dive and orangutan-loving on in Malaysia and Borneo.  But hopefully we will have some adventures from Pai to share about before then…if we could just get off this deck.

would you leave here? there’s even a rainbow.

Love you all,

Haley and Gabe

Other notes:

I learned how to ride a scooter….or at least figured out that it actually is just like riding a bike like Gabe told me.  And don’t make fun of my hat-under-helmet and grandma’s-sun-shirt look.  Sun protection trumps fashion when spending 100km worth of scooter hours under the Thai sun.  And don’t worry Mom, I didn’t leave the parking lot.

no problem

We got some amazing $4/hour massages in Chiang Mai in the grounds of a temple.

We had delicious desserts on our last night in Chiang Mai: Tiramisu and Panna Cotta. It was fun to eat something other than Asian food.

yum

When we ate dinner at Jim, Noi and Monique’s house, Noi and Monique somehow put together a huge delicious Thai meal for 5 in less than an hour.

yum

Pai really is hippie.  They even have a Buffalo Exchange.  But then again, isn’t that a chain and doesn’t that therefore make it corporate?

We really did suffer over picking our next destination. You would think we would be more grateful after traveling through third world countries and seeing people living in poverty, but no. Poor us had to decide between flying to Burma or Malaysia. As I was becoming more and more annoyed I was thinking how ridiculous it was, but that didn’t help either.

Gabe finally got the prototype made and was very happy about it.

Haley found another nice dog.

yum