Pai.
The sky in Pai looks neat, with all sorts of different clouds looming high, or cascading down over the surrounding hills. Pai is located in a valley, but high up — they call it Pai in the Sky. I ended up taking a bunch of photos of the sky (most of which didn’t turn out so great), but the sky always looked especially cool at sunset.
There’s this playground in Pai, where they’ve built all these cool creatures out of wood and steel and car parts and stuff. I met a German girl spinning poi there one day. She liked my Ween t-shirt, and had hairy armpits.
In Pai, you can go for a two-day white-water rafting trip with a collection of people such as this: a Spanish girl and her German boyfriend, who knew a bunch of campfire songs, a Swiss guy who doesn’t drink, an Englishman whose buddy couldn’t come because he was in a motorbike accident, and a Russian-American who hails from, of all places, San Francisco…
…and you’ll see some monkeys at your campsite. Our guide described how the hilltribes still eat monkey brains, even though it’s technically illegal. They eat the brains with the monkeys still alive! They duct tape their mouths! It’s the first spoonful (not the removal of skull-skin) that kills them!
At night, you can hang out at all sorts of chilled out bars — hookah bars, rasta bars, cafes, one bar is even made entirely out of bamboo, on the riverside. You just walk around town and see what’s going on — like this jam session we came across here. The guy pictured there, we were told, is a renowned Thai violinist and just happened to be in town, and came and sat in. (Click on the image to view the 20-second YouTube clip I was able to film. Thank you, new camera!) Later on, they played a great cover of that first song from Buena Vista Social Club.
There are lots of stray dogs in Pai. Lots. I wrote a poem about them…
The Dogs of Pai
bark at night
beneath moonlight
bark at break of dayfleas they have
and howl atthey are dirty and lustful,
looking always
for food, scrawny
and gnashingthey grrrr, sinister,
when you pass
down their alley,
their teeth barethe dogs of Pai
are everywhere
hereasleep and alive,
no master,
no homeif they run free
then so do we
Yes, indeed. Pai.
Tags: monkeys, Pai, Photos, rafting, Thailand
ismateo
i think one of my favorite things about this post is not that you got a new camera (i wonder, what did you do with the old one?), or that you saw beautiful places and met weird and interesting backpacker-types who do poi in thailand (surprise suprise), but rather, that it ended with an advertisement for disposable travel underwear.
the internet is so smart!