Map, Journey and Costs

Note: prices are for 2 adults with baggage

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From	To	Mode	Duration	Cost
🇹🇭 Bangkok	🇹🇭 Chiang Mai	Coach	10:00	£49.81
🇹🇭 Chiang Mai	🇹🇭 Pai	Minibus	04:00	£12.27
🇹🇭 Pai	🇹🇭 Chiang Mai	Minibus	04:00	£12.28
🇹🇭 Chiang Mai	🇹🇭 Chiang Rai	Coach	04:00	£13.78
🇹🇭 Chiang Rai	🇹🇭 Chiang Khong	Bus	02:00	£3.46

A long (10 hour) bus journey brought us into Chiang Mai from Bangkok. There were no stops whatsoever, but the coach was fairly fancy with an airline-style entertainment system built into the seats and a bathroom. They kept us reasonably well fed and watered, but still a slog of a journey.

2 days prior, Martin sorts hotels.com by price-per-night - ascending of course. Slap bang at the top there’s a room for £8, it says Chiang Mai somewhere and we’re only staying for 1 night to transfer to Pai, so good enough.

The first warning sign was when, in a coach carpark after the aforementioned 10 hour bus journey, it turned out the hotel was extremely suburban and the western name they traded under was very Thai alphabetty on Google maps and the taxi app.

After a good 20 minutes trying to enter the name of the hotel into the taxi app, we gave up and selected a restaurant 10 minutes walk from it. All good we thought, at least we can get a proper meal too after a long journey.

When the taxi driver came to drop us off, it was clear to all that the restaurant we selected was a closed food truck on a dual carriageway. He pulled over into the hard shoulder and gestured as to whether we really want to be dropped here.

We explained the situation, showed him the hotel address and he kindly agreed to drop us there. When we arrive, it’s a country road with no hotel in sight. He gestured again at whether we are OK here, so we do the British thing and said it’s absolutely perfect whilst giving him a tip.

Balls. After some walking around trying to line up our GPS blob with Google Map’s pin for the hotel, Martin gives in and politely knocks on the conservatory of a house where someone is watching TV.

Luckily, it was the hotel. We were shown to a cabin with our bed in, and it was quite something:

• A mattress like a cheese grater
• A floor so dirty Martin’s bags are still marked from being placed down
• Very scary electrics, scary enough for us to just use phone torches and our power packs

The owners seemed kind, and sorted us out with some food (supplemented with our emergency Swedish Fish supply):

We quickly turned in for the night to avoid mosquitoes (the cabin roof had some open-air sections), and so that Laura didn’t see a spider.

Martin was banned from booking accomodation for a bit.

After clearing up a misunderstanding where the hut owner thought we wanted to stay a week (we really didn’t!), we high tailed it in a mini-van transfer up some extremely twisty roads to Pai.

Pai is the hippie capital of Thailand, and is crammed full of travellers. In most ways that made it quite enjoyable. There was a lot of energy about the place, a great night market:

We stayed on the outskirts to get out of some of the hustle and bustle, and got a free shuttle taxi in/out when we wanted to get involved!

A typical January day in Pai weighs in at a humid 32°C, so it’s surprising that one of the top tourist attractions is a natural hot spring that gets up to a sweltering 36°C!

Accessible with a 20 minute sweaty walk from our accomodation, we plunged into the lower pool first - despite being the same temperature as our surroundings it did cool us down a bit!

We spent a couple of hours relaxing, gradually working our way up to the top pool. In order to keep the 36°C water tolerable we had to slowly submerge ourselves in it. Even then Martin only lasted a couple of minutes in it, and Laura even less.

After the hot springs we had a bit of a snack, and walked to Pai Canyon for sunset. We arrived at 17:30ish along with a good number of other tourists. A dusty and precarious climb offered some great views and a smashing sunset.

On our last day in Pai we fancied a bit of a walk, and found a hike to Mae Yen Waterfall after some Googling.

We wanted to do it independently, but we didn’t want to hire scooters as the listing suggested. We found a random restaurant as close to the start of the hike that a car could get to, and haggled with a few taxi drivers. They seemed very confused about where we wanted to go, and why we wanted to go there - but we did eventually make it!

It was a great hike, albeit a tad wet! We counted 36 river crossings, and a fair stint towards the waterfall where we had to just walk in the river.

Good views at the waterfall, and we saw some really cool butterflys along the way that were bizaarely attracted to the ground:

The way back was a bit of a slog (we couldn’t find a taxi to grab us). Also there were a lot of stray, barky and territorial dogs: so we spent a lot of it on edge, trying to avoid them.

We made it back to Pai unscathed, and enjoyed a couple of drinks and some market food.

The next day we caught a mini-bus back down the windy hill to spend a few days in Chiang Mai.

The accomodation was much more appropriate this time, as Laura was in charge.

It was a bit odd however, you had to take shoes off inside the hostel - as is standard in Thailand. But they had polished the wooden floors so much that even if you took off your socks it was like walking on ice! ⛸️ And Martin (but not Laura, weirdly :thinking_face:) seemed to get static shocks from most surfaces :high_voltage:.

The hostel cat made up for it though 🐱:

The main event in Chiang Mai was Laura’s birthday, for which there was a fun packed agenda:

A flower festival was being held right next to our hostel, and there was a parade on the morning of Laura’s birthday:

It was very good fun with lots of colour and flowers. After an hour or so in the blazing sun, with no sign of the parade coming to an end, we decamped to Kati breakfast and brunch.

After filling our boots with coffee and eggs we decided to head for a bit of a ramble.

It was a 2 mile-ish out-and-back trail to a temple, nothing too taxing a a good leg stretch:

There were meant to be Monk’s robes hung on the trail up, but alas there was nothing in the trees and a bunch of fully robed monks at the top.

On the way back we boarded Chiang Mai’s answer to Uber Pool: a Songthaew.

They’re converted pick-up trucks, where the back has 2 benches holding up to 10 passengers. As you wander around Chiang Mai, the drivers will often honk you and wait for you to board. For a modest fee they’ll take you anywhere in the city, with the catch that they’ll try to pick up others along the way and will arbitrarily decide what order to drop people off in.

We weren’t brave enough to catch one when honked in the city, but caught this driver off-guard eating his lunch so capitalised.

Back in the city, we were a bit parched so decided to find a bar. Martin found a place called Something On Mars, that looked quite interesting so we headed in.

It was the strangest place ever, there were a couple of fake moon rocks and a projector and people were spending a good amount of time taking selfies with them. Check out their instagram photos to see what I mean.

There were scores of people queueing for selfies, with time limits enforced:

Well, when in Rome:

(Laura was too shy to post hers)

We fairly swiftly decamped to a more conventional bar, and had a few more celebratory bevvies:

The morning after, feeling a bit worse for wear, we were picked up by Benny’s Home Cooking for a Thai cooking lesson.

We booked on to an open group course, but were told the other group members had decided to pay for a private course instead - leaving us also to have a private class for no extra moolah 💪

First order of business, Benny took us around a local market:

We got to see/try some weird and wonderful things.

Kanom bueang - a Thai desert that’s part crepe, part marshmallow and part shrimp (?! tastier than it sounds, though):

Lots of fiery chilis 🌶️:

Some extremely long green beans:

Sweet tamarind (tastes like a date):

She took us on a tour of the meat section. We weren’t able to take much in there. We were stood next to a lady who had a basket full of live frogs 🐸, and every few moments she would take one out and chop it in half 🔪. We’re both still haunted by the frog screams 😱. It’s almost certainly a sign we should be veggie if we can’t handle that!

The class was held at Benny’s family home. Most of the ingrediants were from her own veg patch, and it was a great outdoor cooking area:

On the menu was:

Quite the feast! It took most of the day, and we both had food babies by the end. It was really good fun, and we picked up some recipies and tips. It cost about £30 each, with Laura’s being covered as a birthday treat from her sister. Not bad for a day’s food and entertainment!

On (what we thought was) our last night in Chiang Mai, we went for a Thai Massage - with a twist. All the masseuses were ex-convicts.

Thailand has one of the largest populations of women prisoners in the world, and Chiang Mai has a prison with a rehabilitation programme where inmates can train to be a masseuse: they’re allowed to keep a portion of the tips and gain a skill to lean on after prison.

It was a bit daunting, and never really relaxing - but we both agreed an hour went by pretty quick. Mine was definitely down for a white collar crime. But Laura was cracking left, right and centre.

We’ve been very last minute about booking things on this trip, and in general don’t have any commitments more than a few days ahead.

It’s worked out pretty well thus far, allowing us to expand and contract portions on a whim.

But in Chiang Mai there was a reckoning, whilst we thought we could waltz to the bus terminal and get a coach to Chiang Rai - alas not. They’d sold out for the day 🙁

We found a cheap hotel near the bus terminal to stay at, and a not-so cheap hotel that allowed us to hang out in their pool for a chill out day :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

Chiang Rai was mainly a stop-over to break up the journey towards Thailand’s border with Laos.

We did have a nice curry and pop out to see a cool temple (Wat Rong Suea Ten):

but the main item on the agenda was to decide how we’d get to Luang Prabang in Laos - our next destination.

The options were either:

• A 3 day 2 night boat - the “slow boat”

  • Pros:
    • Get to laze down the Mekong river
    • Might see some elephants on the bank
    • Could maybe be a bit cheaper?
    • Other travelers rave about it
  • Cons:
    • Conflicting information online about the logistics, which is a bit stressful
    • If over-booked you might have to travel in a noisy engine room
    • Takes a day longer to get to Luang Prabang

• A 2 day 1 night high-speed train

  • Pros:
    • Fast! We’d save a day
    • Packaged itinerary so less pressure to work out border-faff for ourselves.
  • Cons
    • It’s very new so nobody has written about what it’s like
    • Potentially not as scenic as the slow boat
    • FOMO on an East Asian must-do item

There wasn’t enough in it, so we let fate decide:

And I now write this in a hotel room in Chiang Khong, where tomorrow we hope to cross the border to Laos and catch the slow boat. Goodbye Thailand 👋 you’ve been good to us