Confessions of a Nomad: Northern Thailand

We arrived in Chiang Mai after a 14 hour overnight train ride from Bangkok. The overnight train has become our preferred method of travel, not only to save on lodging for the night but you also get to see the countryside. Unfortunately Thailand is having one of the worst droughts the country has experienced in years so rather than seeing lush jungle, green mountains and farmland there was a lot of brown, dead vegetation and the farms all looked thirsty. We spent 3 days in Chiang Mai which is a large city by Thailand standards but its downtown community, surrounded by a moat, has a small feel to it. There is a huge night bazaar where we enjoyed doing some cheap shopping and bartering with the local vendors for homemade jewelry, all natural candles and roasted cockroaches with a few crickets on the side...mmmmmm! Other than shopping at the market and eating copious amounts of delicious Thai food there is not much else to do in Chiang Mai so we headed further north to the town of Pai, which came highly recommended by other backpackers. The road to Pai is comparable to a roller coaster ride with all its winding turns and steep inclines, there is a t-shirt vendor in town who sells a shirt with the number 720 printed on it - the number of turns on the road from Chiang Mai to Pai! We stayed in a bungalow similar to the one in Koh Tao only it cost half the price and our view from the porch was not of a lagoon but instead colorful 4 ft tall wildflowers, a fair trade. Pai is a small country town in a valley surrounded by mountains, waterfalls, farmland and hot springs. We rented a motorbike to explore the areas outside of town, it took some practice and almost cost Josh half a leg but I got the hang of it and was cruising through town just like the locals and the transplanted western hippies. We spent a day at the hot springs soaking in mineral rich waters that get piped down to a stream that was dammed in several areas to create pools and a constant flow. The water was not nearly as scorching as the onsen (Japanese hot spring) this came as a relief since the air temperature was much warmer. There are several waterfalls on the outskirts of town, we chose to swim at Mohr Paeng because it was one of the only falls that were flowing, the others reduced to a trickle because of the drought. There were multiple pools to swim in at Mohr Paeng, some deep enough to jump off the surrounding rocks into and the local kids were having a blast sliding down or bombing off of different rocks into the falls. (For those of you who are familiar it was just like Falls Village in CT) The one downfall of our visit was the poor air quality in Pai due to to slash and burn techniques used by the farmers. During the daytime we could constantly smell smoke and ash fell from the sky sometimes in quarter-sized chunks. At night we could see bright orange fires burning through mountains that were only a couple miles away. The visibility was poor and Josh had sinus and throat issues from breathing smoke-filled air that would have surely warranted a health advisory warning in California. We definitely want to return to Pai sometime after monsoon season so we can appreciate all it has to offer. After 5 days in Pai we traveled back south to Chiang Mai and are waiting for a friend to arrive. We plan on doing a 3 day trek to hill tribe villages in the far north and then we will have to cross the border to Cambodia before our visa expires.