Pai – Day 13
Despite not getting to bed until 5 i woke up at 8:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. Met 3 British girls, Sharon, Sheena and Lauren, who are friends of Dee’s for breakfast. I was so hung-over and felt really etch all morning. Felt better after breakfast.
We decided to rent motorbikes for the day, a brave move considering none of us have ever ridden before, so at 11:00 we went looking for a motorbike rental shop. I felt particularly sorry for the shop owner when all 5 of us walked in and said “we’d like to rent bikes please, something easy because none of us have ridden before”. Dee, Sheena and I were given manual 125cc bikes and Sharon and Lauren got automatic scooters. The cost was 100B for 24 hours and 40B for insurance on the bike. I think the guy in the shop may have been really worried about us so he had 2 of his staff take us out to the airport to teach us to ride. We basically got a free 2 hour lesson on how to use the bikes. Once we were all riding ok we took the bikes out to some of the back streets and drove around town in a little line at about 15km an hour, the locals thought we were hysterical. We took our time so that everyone could build up their confidence before joining the traffic on the roads.
Once everyone was feeling good about the bikes and how to handle them we decided to head to the hot springs for the afternoon. The hot springs are about 8km out of town. About half way there we stopped to wait for Sharon to catch up, but as we stopped Lauren dropped her bike on her leg and burnt herself badly on the exhaust pipe. In all the commotion we barely notice Sharon had done the same thing. It was pure luck that two other friends of ours, Zoe and Antony drove past at the same time and knew exactly what to do because Zoe had done the same thing only 2 months earlier. They rode back to grab their burn cream and dressings while we waited and Lauren and Sharon rested. I think they were in a bit of shock. After the girls burns had been treated we decided to continue to the hot springs rather than waste a day.
The scenery in Pai is amazing and particularly at the hot springs the vegetation was so dense. The spring at the top was boiling water and at the bottom you could buy eggs and boil them in the spring. As you walk further down the river the water is not so hot and we went into one of the pools, it was still pretty hot and it took some getting used to, but it was gorgeous. The sulfur smell was not so pleasant. Saw some woman washing a baby in the stream much further down where the water was only warm.
On the ride back to town Dee and I took off and picked up some speed, we reached 80km per hour which was a lot of fun. All 7 of us (Dee, Zoe, Antony, Sharon, Sheena, Lauren and I) went out for dinner; we had a really great night and great food at a gorgeous Thai restaurant where we all sat on cushions on the floor. We paid for Zoe and Antony’s dinner to thank them for being so great to the girls today. We all decided after dinner that we weren’t up for drinking so instead we had coffee at a cute little café/bar and rented a movie at this cool place where they have private TV rooms and you rent the DVD you want to watch. The rooms were very cool, it was just like a lounge room with a big comfy couch, its amazing what you appreciate when you go without it for a while, we watched ‘Meet the Fockers’ and it turned out to be a great night.
Tags: Thailand
Nic
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