MY PAI FAMILY

Joshua and I reached Pai. After our trip we were a bit gatvol and Pai seemed dull. I started questioning myself¹. It was a tiny, one street kind of town². Before we found a place to sleep, we looked for beer³. We met some British lads – they had booked in at a hostel nearby. It seemed nice enough so we headed there.

The hostel was just off the main road but it looked dead. I left my bags there then continued on my journey to find a cheaper place⁴⁵.

After my walk around, I hadn’t managed to find another hostel so I decided to book in. We headed to the hostel’s bar area, and I met an Israeli guy named Tal⁶. He had been travelling through Thailand for 6 weeks⁷ and had been in Pai for around a month. He was just chilling and exploring the countryside everyday⁸.

I headed to town with Joshua and we spent the rest of the day exploring. Afterwards, we headed to the night market for dinner. Joshua left the next day.

Thankfully, I had made some friends at the hostel the night before. Tom, an Australian, and I rented a scooter and headed to the Yun lai viewpoint. We got lost on the way⁹. While searching for which way was up, we found some people from our hostel heading there too¹⁰.

Since everyone was lost, we decided to find each other¹¹. That group became my first de facto backpacking family – we were a great group of friends¹². At the top of the viewpoint, we started a game of frisbee and completely monopolised it¹³.

The next few days were like a blur, full of parties, exploring the countryside, night markets and a lot a lot of table tennis. I became really good friends with everyone in that group. Slowly, our group expanded. Initially, I had intended to stay in Pai for 3/4 days because of them I stayed a week.

We became quite close and I enjoyed spending time with them wherever else we met. I did meet several members in several different places including Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka¹⁴. I do look forward to seeing them again 🙂¹⁵

1. and him ↩︎
2. I hadn’t learnt to fall in love with these kinds of places yet ↩︎
3. Priorities… ↩︎
4. The first place was the cheapest, iykyk ↩︎
5. Generally, booking in person is cheaper as sites like booking or agoda charge a fee which gets passed onto you, the consumer ↩︎
6. Who I thought was the coolest dude in the world at the time ↩︎
7. Practically a lifetime ↩︎
8. It’s always nice to meet experienced travellers, one can really learn a lot from them ↩︎
9. Is there any other way to travel? ↩︎
10. They had also gotten lost ↩︎
11. #deep ↩︎
12. Didn’t hurt that several of the girls were really attractive ↩︎
13. Soz everyone else ↩︎
14. Stories for another time ↩︎
15. Especially the pretty girls ↩︎