Sunday, January 30, 2022
7:57 am. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I’m having a bit of a later start this morning. And that’s because I successfully took a nap yesterday afternoon, and that led to me staying up much later, and then I forced myself to stay in bed longer this morning. I got out the earplugs and I was able to go back to sleep at around five this morning and wake up again at seven thirty. And I feel pretty good now. I missed the dogs during their prison yard time, but that’s okay. I don’t see any motorcycles out there, so I don’t have anyone to bug about their upcoming Mae Hong Son Loop adventures. And today will likely go by in many hours of editing videos from my own trip.
I find myself thinking back over this last scooter trip. Looking back, I didn’t visit that many actual places during my trip. That’s particularly true when you consider that I was gone for forty-seven days and I was on a scooter. Had I been travelling all the time, I could have stayed in thirty or forty different towns. Instead, I did my usual thing of basing myself in a town and then doing day trips around it. And I returned to Mae Sot along the same route I took to leave it. And because of that, I didn’t stay in very many different towns. I divided my time between just seven: Tha Song Yang, Mae Sariang, Mae Chaem, Mae Hong Son, Ban Rak Thai, Pai, and Chiang Dao. And because I retraced my steps back to Mae Sot, I visited two of those towns twice and one of them three times. So, in terms of towns, there was a lot of repetition. And I actually loved that. On my return visits to the towns, I always stayed in different hotels, and that was quite enjoyable. I didn’t return to the same guest house in each town. I always sought out a new one, and the hotels and guest houses played a big part in this trip. In some ways, the guest houses were just as central to the trip as the roads and the scenery.
A highlight for me was the village of Ban Rak Thai. The place could be dismissed as a somewhat superficial tourist attraction. It started off its life as an unusual village in Thailand, founded by settlers from China who fled from Mao’s revolution. The settlers maintained their Chinese language, culture, and way of life. And that aspect of the village, combined with a beautiful setting in a tea-growing region around a lake nestled in the mountains, makes it a popular getaway for Thai tourists. And over the years, it developed into a kind of Chinese theme park. There’s almost nothing genuine about the village anymore. It consists of nothing but hotels, guest houses, restaurants, tea shops, coffee shops, and tourist activities. However, I found the place charming. Looking back, I was quite lucky in that I took a room that opened up right onto the lake. And this lake is known for a beautiful, thick mist that forms over it in the early morning. This mist and the sunrise attract most visitors. Anyone that can manage it gets up extremely early and enjoys the morning mist and sunrise. And it is one of the coldest places in Thailand. In the early morning, it was so cold that the Thai people were bundled up in a manner to equal Arctic explorers. I could see my breath clearly in the cold air. Once I felt that cold and saw my breath billowing upwards, I understood why so much mist formed. It was a beautiful sight. And despite the Chinese theme park veneer, I enjoyed my visit very much.
Another highlight was the town of Pai. I feel like I really came into my own on this trip in Pai. I found places to visit on day trips every single day. During the height of the pandemic restrictions, Pai had turned into a ghost town. But I was lucky in that it was starting to come back to life during my visit. It has a famous Walking Street, and it was bustling and full of life during my visits, particularly during my first Saturday night there. I even had a companion that night. Someone who watches my YouTube videos made the long trip from Chiang Mai to Pai just on the off-chance that he would run into me. I’d posted online when I would be in Pai, and this guy, Leon, found me. And we spent a couple of days together exploring Pai. That was surprisingly enjoyable. Pai is a special place. It’s long been known as a place for foreigners to hang out. With its hippie history, it catered to a certain type of person for a long time, and you still see yoga being performed on mountain tops to greet the rising sun and things like that. And there are vegan restaurants. I walked past one place many times during my week there, and I was always interested to see fifteen or twenty modern hippies sitting on the floor on cushions, and they were all juggling and playing the guitar and flutes and sipping organic tea and doing other hippie-type things. But they were far outnumbered now by just your typical tourists like me, many of us going around the Loop on scooters and motorbikes and bicycles.