Pai in the sky

Pai is described as being a place that is reminiscent of a town between Kabul and Kathmandu on the old hippie trail. It's a laid back sort of place where everyone is a tourist, the locals all speak English and the hill tribe people come into town for the market.


I was being entertained by a Thai punk rocker at a local bar when I spotted someone familiar looking. After many minutes of staring intently at her I went over and sure enough, it was Sandra the Swiss girl from the Mahasi Centre in Yangoon. She just got back to Thailand after a month in Burma. The world's a small place. Apparently not to many Afghan women travel these parts of the world because Sandra mentioned that she kept running into people that had met me on her travels through Myanmar.

We hung out the rest of the night and went to a reggae bar where the local band butchered a few Bob Marley tunes before the microphone was handed over to a travelling musician from Britain. He performed a very good version of one of my favorite songs, Leyla by Eric Clapton. It was a very special moment and I almost cried but then was distracted by the balloons being set free to float into space above us.

Poi is a favourite past-time in Thailand. Everywhere I go the locals seem to be playing with fire. It is now on the list of things to learn along with guitar, singing, horse back riding, fencing, salsa, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Farsi and juggling. I was going to add neutering dogs to the list but I felt it was inappropriate.



There are a lot of stray dogs in Asia. Makes me wonder why they don't start a national neutering campaign to control the population. Maybe it has something to do with their religion. Regardless, there were about twelve dogs at the Family Guest House where I was staying. I took a picture of two of them playing in front of my hut and then almost squashed a litter of puppies on my way to the hammocks in the restaurant.


Took the bus to Mae Hong Son in the afternoon with the locals. All the other travellers got on the special minivans (at double the price) for some reason. It was fun to hang out with the kiddies on the bus on the beautiful ride through the forested hills. Once I arrived I discovered that Li had not actually made it back from Chiang Mai yet. Again, I ate myself through the night market by the lake near her place.