Pai was a very easy 2 hour drive away featuring only 700+ corners. Luckily both of us slept for a large portion of it but woke up in a small backpacker town in the mountains.

Our £6.50 hotel was right off the main ‘walking street’ so food stalls were never far away. Our first day was spent on a tour seeing the highlights - bathing in a hot/warm river, walking through a fault line, over a bamboo bridge and watching the sunset from Pai’s version of the Grand Canyon with a beer and some new friends.

After all this effort we thought that a) we couldn’t possibly leave Pai just yet & b) we needed some luxury. So we upgraded to a £19 a night bungalow with AC and a balcony near to the river. We continued the trend that evening with £1.50 Mojitos and live Jazz in town.

Today we discovered ‘river tubing’ for ourselves. We opted not to travel to the famous river in Laos which does this on a much grander scale. We paid our money and the driver whisked us off up river before putting us on an old tyre inner tube and floated with us the hour or so back to town. We liked it so much we did it again in the afternoon (after lunch and a drink with some bunnies at the bunny cafe)!

All in all Pai has been one of our favourite places so far. Very calm, cheap, pretty and laid back. Full of backpackers and not a coach-load of tourists to be seen.

Tomorrow night is a short hop back to Chiang Mai then a overnight sleeper ‘VIP’ bus to Bangkok where more luxury in the form of another 2 night Hilton stay awaits courtesy of Vince’s points. We look forward to comparing the complimentary afternoon tea & cocktails in the lounge to Bali...

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