WANDERING TOGETHER

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

762 CURVES TO PAI, THAILAND

Road trip, sweet road trip.

I've been trying to get Cecily on a long distance motorcycle trip for several years, but the promise of Southern New Jersey never did it for her. Well, after eating an enormous platter of Tex-Mex enchiladas she'd been craving, complete with frijoles and rice, Cecily was feeling generous. With the help of the very-Texan owner of Mexican Grill in Chiang Mai, Thailand, we were able to convince her that the beautiful ride north to Pai was well worth strattling the back of a two wheeler for 3 to 4 hours.

The next day, we upgraded our tiny scooter for something worthy of a road trip:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

We loaded up the hog real good.

Then we took some completely unstaged candids.

I insisted Cecily take her inspiration from Wayne's World's Cassandra:

I think she nailed it.

After a good twenty minutes more of posing, we decided we should get on the road. The drive from Chiang Mai to Pai is known as one of the world's great motorcycle routes with 762 curves through green mountains in just over 3 hours of driving.

Here's some of them curves:

The town of Pai is pretty small. Just a handful of restaurants and bungalow hotels and a night market with the Pai River running right through town. The fun of Pai is exploring the beautiful valley around it

and paying $10 a night for a "modern hut" on the river.

Okay, so it's basically a trailer park. But it's a funky, hippy trailer park. For $10 a night.

And to get to town, you have to cross the river over this sturdy bridge:

And in town are other westerners who made the trek through the mountains on a scooter or motorcycle, somewhat unsuccessfully. It seems that lots of people come to Thailand and decide that their first drive on a two wheeler should be a windy three hour trek on foreign roads and I'm guessing some of them regret it:

So, if you think you can handle the road to Pai, or you don't mind losing some skin to the pavement, I highly recommend taking the trip to Pai.

We sure had fun.

THUNG DONG FARM!

We found Thung Dong Farm on the internet back in December and I emailed the owner, Ae, to see if we could stay in the summer. For the six months before we actually went to the farm, Ae emailed us literally every other week to check in - what did we like to eat for breakfast? Were we allergic to anything? Did we need any hotel recommendations? Did our cellphone have a Thai SIM card? Were we scared of the military coup? Did we like hot springs? Pomello juice?

Ae was so genuinely interested in our trip and our preferences that we knew his farm was going to be memorable!

The term "farm" is used loosely here. It's basically just two city dudes, Ae and Nack, who moved out to the countryside to run the little farm and host other city folk like us on a couple acres of land with a hilarious collection of animals. Ae and Nack are really funny guys and they kept us busy for three days just putting us in stupid situations with their animals and letting us play.

We fed the chickens and the geese!

We fed the fish!

We followed around this wild horse, and fed him carrots (they filled our fridge with them!)...

Read doesn't seem to know what to do with a wild horse...

In the afternoons, Nack would pull up to the house and tell us to get in his sidecar with a bag of feed and we'd go see their comically obese hogs (which they rescued from the Hill People, who eat the hogs, and they don't like that).

Their most prized animals were their set of pink buffaloes, which apparently is a real animal. The guys were obsessed with them and were trying to breed them to make more pink buffaloes. On the last day, Ae brought us out to ride them and we thought he was joking.

He totally wasn't.

Nack also fed us something delicious every three hours - like, A LOT.

And Ae BBQ'ed just so we'd have beer snacks.

Nack grabbed a couple of skewers and left for about 15 minutes to go bring them to a girl he liked.

When he came back, he taught us how to set off these sweet lanterns. These are "medium size".

Did I mention this all cost less than a stay at a roadside Howard Johnson in Upstate NY?

If you're in Northern Thailand, GO before they figure out they're running a magical summer camp for adults and that EVERYONE wants to ride a pink buffalo. We felt like we had a Thai family for a few days and it was one of the best experiences we had in Thailand, which was one of the best countries we've visited!