Pai Land

Pai is a slice of holiday heaven. More Mullum than Mullumbimby, when we arrived in Pai I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be. Lots of nice travelers, great food, pretty scenery and a really cheap room in Mr Jan’s Medicinal Garden, what more could we have asked for?

There were restaurants with names like ‘The Witching Well’ and ‘Good Health’ where you could drink wheatgrass shots with green tea chasers. If I didn’t have a flight booked from Chaing Mai I would have rented a scooter for a month and settled down.

The Walled City of Temples and Trekking

For a city famous for temples and trekking I did a whole lot of drinking and shopping in Chiang Mai. Diane and I visited a stupid number of tailors and dress shops and left empty handed in pursuit my flower girl dress for Holly’s upcoming wedding.

Much better than shopping and drinking was having a massage at the Chiang Mai women’s prison. The massage therapists at the prison are due for release and are involved in a rehabilitation course to improve their employment prospects. Although it was great I was incredibly tired and woke up half way through the massage having my arm pulled around my back and over my head at a very unusual and uncomfortable angle.  I didn’t see much more of Chiang Mai, but all reports were good from other travelers.

 A fairy door in Chiang Mai?

A Small Walled City

Riding on a recommendation we headed to the small city of Lampang, described to us as a smaller version of Chiang Mai with no tourists and a fabulous wooden temple. We jumped on a bus from Sukhothai to Lampang and a few hours later found ourselves in a gorgeous guest house on the bank of a river. There were many many travelers, even more coffee shops and too many restaurants selling dishes with no chili catering to western tastes. We drank wine and listened to hits from the eighties played by a live band, it felt like we were on holidays.

Just outside of Lampang there are two elephant attractions, the first is an Elephant Conservation centre which specializes in getting elephants to perform for an audience and the second is the world’s first elephant hospital. We visited both, and both were great fun. The conservation centre didn’t seem like they were too kind to the elephants though, bored with the predictable performance I snuck behind the scenes and realized that the elephants were all chained up by the ankle, not roaming free as I would have preferred to believe. 

The elephant hospital on the other hand is an eye opening place, not designed for tour groups, nor for close encounters with the big fellas. The hospital has made incredible progress in rehabilitating elephants that have fallen victim to undetonated land mines in Cambodia left over from the American War. To date they have fitted two elephants with prosthetic legs. I can’t even begin to imagine the logistics of such a feat, nevertheless they have succeeded and we were able to catch glimpses of the elephants with all four legs in action. Amazing stuff!

Wat Phra That Lampang Luang is a huge open sided wooden temple quite unlike any of the other (seemingly zillions) of temples I have visited in Thailand. It wasn’t just visually spectacular, the atmosphere was calming and for me it was more the way that I think temples should make you feel, grounded, in awe and at peace.

A trip

I stayed a few more days at the Monastery before making the trip back to Bangkok. Half waiting for my replacement credit card and half relaxing, I think my time there was well spent.  My money was running lower and lower and endless conversations with Mastercard were not getting me any closer to having a replacement card arranged. Sister Nathinee kindly befriended me and offered to lend me money to get back to Bangkok, for accommodation, 'whatever I needed' she said. I was really taken aback that she was offering to trust me with her money when she clearly didn’t have much. I couldn’t decide if this meant I was really lucky or really down and out, I settled for feeling fortunate and well taken care of. 

When the call came that my card couldn’t be delivered for a further five days (urgh!) Sister Nathinee helped me get to the train station and somehow wrangled me a ticket on the last train even after I was told it was sold out. Days like this make me feel truly blessed. I sat next to a young funny Thai guy all the way to Bangkok, clutching my bag to my chest the whole way, determined not to get robbed again while I slept.

Way back at the end of November, during my second week in India, I met a great girl from Seattle called Diane who reminded me what traveling is all about. She left India to head for Europe and I came to south east Asia, and we met up again on the fifth of March in Bangkok. I knew she had arrived at the hostel when I heard her reassuring the staff that I was in fact not her friend, and that they were mistaken. It was too funny for words.

We hung about in Bangkok for a while, finally sorting out my money situation, posting luggage and getting new passport pages. Thoroughly sick of the city we headed north on the day train to explore the temple ruins of Sukhothai. It was so beautiful, too beautiful!