Saturday, January 15, 2022
4:48 a.m. Room 11, Lilu Hotel
Pai, Mae Hong Son
Thailand
I had vague plans this morning to walk up to the large, white Buddha statue on the hill overlooking Pai, but it’s raining outside. I find that astonishing and kind of personally insulting. Rain! Rain? It’s not supposed to rain at this time of year, is it? And yet, it has been raining and quite overcast for the last three or four days. And that trend appears set to continue for a few more days. I assumed that one of the great things about this trip to the north at this time of year was that I wouldn’t have to stress out about the weather and I would never have to bother checking the weather forecast as I made plans. But here I am, once again, looking carefully at online weather forecasts to see whether I can risk going outside. I still might go for this walk. I’ll prepare for it and see what happens. It would also be nice to just stay inside. I can have a nice hotel breakfast. I’ve been missing most of the breakfasts here because I’ve been leaving for places early in the morning.
And speaking of leaving early, I left fairly early the other day to go to the Pai Canyon. I think the normal thing is to go to the canyon for sunset. People bring cold beer there as the sun goes down. I think agencies on the Walking Street even organize a kind of sunset party. I heard people discussing this the other day. Everyone piles into a van with a bunch of cold beer and heads for the canyon at sunset. With my habits, I tend to morning activities rather than evening ones, so I got my cameras ready and set off on my scooter before the sun was up. I was not on the party bus as the sun was going down.
That was a great morning. It really was. It was ice cold that early in the morning, but I knew it was going to warm up eventually. There was a brief moment, however, when I thought I wouldn’t even be able to leave. A large number of people had checked into the Lilu overnight, and my scooter was boxed in. But I was able to physically move one of the scooters and get out of there. If I remember right, I spent some time setting up the GoPro to capture some video of me leaving the Lilu. And my idea was to do the same at the Pai Canyon itself. I haven’t seen any of the video yet, but I have high hopes for it. At least I know that I worked very hard to do it.
The Pai Canyon is located just a few kilometers outside of town, and despite the cold, I got there in short order. I knew I’d be passing a famous coffee shop on my way. I thought I might be able to stop there on my way back to do a kind of video epilogue of the experience. This place is called Coffee in Love, and it was made famous by two movies, one from Thailand and one from China. The movie from Thailand was called Pai in Love. And I had heard that a scene took place at Coffee In Love, and ever since then, people from Thailand would visit that coffee shop to take selfies at the same place where characters in the movie took selfies. I’ve since watched the movie, and that particular scene comes and goes very quickly. Blink and you miss it. So I don’t know why it made such a big impression. But it did. The movie from China was called Lost in Thailand. It was a huge hit, and reports online said that this movie singlehandedly gave a massive boost to tourism from China to Thailand. I read on Wikipedia that visitors from China increased by 70% the year after the movie was released. And restaurants and the tourism industry in Pai in general started to cater to Chinese visitors – all because of this one movie. I watched Lost in Thailand as well, and I don’t get it. I’m not sure I even saw a scene where the coffee shop was featured. There was one segment that took place during Songkran, and our two heroes got caught up in a water fight. And that might have taken place at Coffee In Love. But it’s hard to tell. You never see the actual coffee shop or a sign for the place. In any event, I never did see Coffee in Love that morning. I guess I was looking in the wrong direction when I passed it. So I didn’t go there during my trip to Pai Canyon. But that’s okay. My experience at Pai Canyon was so big and so interesting that it didn’t need anything else to come afterwards.
I arrived at the parking area at the same time as three other foreigners on scooters. Other than that, the place was empty except for a very friendly puppy. The puppy became a star player in my experience of the canyon. I was initially amused to see the puppy, because I had noticed a large sign on a nearby property warning people to be careful of the dangerous guard dogs. And right after I saw the sign, this cute puppy came bounding over.
The puppy ran across the road when the three other foreigners arrived, and I was puzzled to see that they were scared of the puppy. One young man was backing away in fear and trying to shoo the puppy away. I tossed a lighthearted comment his way when I arrived. I think I said something about a “puppy attack”, and this guy said that you never know which dogs were carrying rabies. That’s why he wanted the puppy to go away. But I bent down and called the puppy over and happily pet him and let him lick my hands. I wasn’t trying to show the guy up. I just couldn’t resist the chance to play with a puppy.
I didn’t want to ruin the canyon experience of these three foreigners, so I held back for a while and moved slowly to give them a chance to go ahead and have the canyon to themselves. Then I set up the GoPro here and there and captured some video of me leaving my scooter and climbing up the trail to the canyon. The canyon itself, when I reached the top of the trail, far exceeded my expectations. It really did. I think if you watch any drone footage of the canyon, you wouldn’t be particularly impressed. It doesn’t have huge physical features. This isn’t the Grand Canyon of the United States. It’s quite small and limited in scope. But it is dramatic. The trails are badly eroded and quite narrow, and the drop-off on either side was often very steep and very far. It wouldn’t take much for a visitor to slip and go over the edge and be badly hurt or die. Essentially, visiting the Pai Canyon is ridge walking. All the trails follow the top ridges of this rock formation. The trail itself branches off in different directions, and I followed all of them to the very end, and then I returned to the main trail and kept going. One spot in particular was quite tricky, and I made it even trickier for myself by filming my climb. And that meant going down the cliff first. Then I set up the GoPro at the bottom. Then I had to climb back up, turn around, and climb back down again. And then when I left from that area, I had to climb back up one more time. I ended up doing the climb four times instead of just the normal twice. And I did the same thing on the far side when I had to climb up out of that ravine. I also had the Hero 7 running on the chest harness, so I will have footage of all these climbs from multiple angles and on multiple cameras. It will take some effort to stitch it together into a story that makes sense.
The puppy had gone with the three other foreigners when they entered the canyon. I’m sure the rabies guy was thrilled about that. But they eventually reached a spot that was too steep for the puppy, and I found the puppy sitting up at the top of the trail and whining unhappily at being left behind. The puppy was more interested in the group of three foreigners than in me, but when I climbed down that cliff, the puppy watched sadly from the top and whined as it tried to follow me.
I encountered a young guy from Germany on the trails. He showed up just as I was attempting the most difficult part of the trail, and he appeared to be watching my progress from a distance. In fact, when I encountered that steep section of cliff, I almost turned back. It looked to be a bit too risky, and I didn’t see any great reward on the other side for attempting it. But I knew that the three other foreigners before me had gone there. And I thought that if they could do it, surely I could do it. And it was their example that pushed me over the edge to do it myself. And I wondered if the German guy felt the same. Maybe he also wouldn’t have bothered with that climb except that he saw that I did it it successfully and safely.
Anyway, I thought we had this experience in common, and when the German guy caught up to me on the trail at the point where I had turned back from the end, I used that moment as a way to start a conversation. I learned that he had entered Thailand on a program that meant he didn’t have to quarantine. I forget the name of it. It was something like Test and Go. And right after he entered Thailand, the program was cancelled. So he made it in just under the wire. He had flown from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, and then he had rented a motorcycle for the ride around the Mae Hong Son Loop. He said that he had enjoyed Chiang Mai very much. He found the museums in particular to be quite interesting, and he talked a little bit about some of the history he had learned about the Lanna Kingdom.
I really enjoyed our conversation, brief as it was. We talked about all the usual things that foreigners talk about when they meet on the road, and we exchanged information about places to go and practical matters.