Pai, Thailand: What's all the Hype?

In Northern Thailand is a small, but very popular community with foreign travelers called Pai. Pai is well-known for having a transplanted artistic community of ex-pats from the west. There is a progressive, creative and chilled-out vibe that is recognizable as soon as you get off the three hour bus from Chaing Mai, which is the way most travelers arrive. We came to Pai in late April, 2018. The weather was humid and sunny despite being deep into the mountains near the border of Burma.

We rented little bungalows alongside the river, which runs through the heart of the community. There are bamboo bridges that link the "walking street" to the charming bungalows on the other bank.

At first I was bemused and terrified of crossing the bridge, which seems slightly broken or unstable in places but I quickly adapted and got used to it. Although, one night as we sat near the river we did witness some obnoxious drunk westerners "testing" the strength of the bridge by literally leaping across it. It is always people like this that make me a bit embarrassed about traveling to well-known "ex-pat" communities. Still, we came to Pai because we heard this is where all the modern day hippies flock, and we weren't disappointed at all.

There were dozens of bearded men in harem pants, girls with impressively long dread locks and intricate tattoos, and free-spirited people looking for the legendary vegan wraps that Pai is known for (FYI: it's pretty difficult to get vegan food anywhere else in Thailand with any consistency, so Pai is a good place to base yourself for a while if you are in dire need of veggies in your diet). Beyond this, when we arrived we did not see beneath the surface of why this place had some an appeal but we sensed there was a deeper magic.

Our bungalows were perfect, with amazingly fast and reliable WiFi that made it easy to work from our laptops while we lounged in the hammocks of our respective bungalow porches. The breakfast on a raised balcony by the river was also a nice touch every day.

We spent the first few days diligently working in the seclusion of our bungalows and at night we would venture out across the bamboo bridge to the walking street where we would soak up the night market, and sample the absolutely fabulous street vendor foods that were better than any we had had previously in Thailand. And I am speaking for us all, even though my friends had been traveling around Thailand for months before me.

It was in Pai that I made two new friends, Áine and Apatu who were absolutely lovely examples of the kind of people you meet while traveling. Áine was a charming Irish girl teaching and living in Bangkok but on a soujourn to explore the north during a school break, while Apatu was a philosophical Londoner who had spent several months touring around Asia and had been particularly mesmerized by Pai.

We sat on walking street, talking about politics and drug-culture, which led them to start talking about a nearby "hippie commune" the likes of which I had imagined was more a fantasy of the 1960s, come and gone, but lo and behold I was wrong. This sort of thing still exists in Pai. Not that I do, or approve of drugs, but the idea of seeing with my own eyes a commune of bohemians hidden away in the jungly hills of northern Thailand seemed like an essential cultural experience. I saved the story in my mind and decided to try and convince my friends to find it with me on another night. After Apatu left to meet a friend, Áine and I got a bottle of surprisingly decent red wine and went and sat in the hammock of my bungalow, with the nearby sounds of the gently bubbling river setting the tone. Áine liked the bungalows so much that she decided to ditch her own accommodation and rent the one next to me so that we became fast-friends and shared our poetry and writing with each other. She told me if I visited Bangkok that I could stay with her and she'd show me some of the sights of the city and introduce me to her expat teacher friends. I was intrigued by the lifestyle of living and working in Asia, which to me seemed braver and further disconnected from my familiar world than when I had lived in Europe. Áine said she had willingly "cast herself into the sea like a bottle untethered" and this image resonated with me as something both appealing and terrifying.

I told my friends about the hippie commune and the next day, Peter and I ended up trying to find it. We wandered by sheer word of mouth and haphazard directions further and further away from the walking street, down dark dirt roads singing night-noises of the jungle with flickering orange lanterns hanging from messy tangles of wires. Sure enough, we wandered through white gates that announced we had arrived at "Paradise", literally the name of the hippie commune. There were newish dormitories made out of reclaimed cement and stucco buildings that were being covered with bright murals dedicated to mushroom shakes (you read that right).

We met a Swedish girl who was happily painting a dormitory with a psychedelic mural. We asked her if she lived in the dormitory. She smiled enthusiastically,

"No, I live over in that one," she gesticulated with her paintbrush towards a further away dormitory. "But people do live in this one," she said pushing up her glasses with her free hand. It struck me that she was completely non-pulsed to see us wandering around the village as if we could belong there too, if we simply opted to stay.

We found a man-made beach at Paradise, one end had an open platformed bar that sold mushroom shakes and marijuana openly alongside beer and alcoholic beverages. Peter and I wondered how a country with such hard, crackdown drug laws allowed a place like this to operate. But we decided not to be the ones to start asking questions. On the other side of the "beach" was another raised platform which was a stage. There were performers signing songs dedicated to recently passed friends, drugs, love, and even the "bum guns" equipped in every bathroom in Thailand. We listened to improvised rap, acoustic guitar and a very witty girl with a pixy cut sing in a style similar to Courtney Barnett.

There were bright fairly lights, hammocks, bean bags, swings and lounge chairs everywhere. While the beach had two volleyball nets and soccer goals placed so people could play sports. To me, it seemed like we had stumbled onto a community of the past, and these modern hippies that once might have been found in California or Woodstock now had been pushed to nomadic lifestyles in far-away places. And even though there were some older, strung-out looking hippies with glazed eyes and immobile attitudes lingering in hammocks on Paradise peripheries, I could not imagine this place would last much longer without being raided or closed down. But perhaps that's the cynic in me. Peter and I became self-aware after watching the first few performances that we were dressed as innocent, perhaps borderline yuppies and we really didn't belong in Paradise.

"We have to leave here, or we will get trapped," I said to Peter as it approached the witching hour of midnight. And so we roused ourselves from the mysterious trance of the music and wandered back through the shadowy jungle roads to our bungalows.

Around Pai, there are other amazing attractions that can be visited by day. We rented mopeds for about 20 bucks and took the encouragingly well-maintained jungle roads. We flew up and down mountains on two bikes. First we headed to the natural hot springs near Pai, which personally I thought were overpriced and overrated.

Then we traveled further and deeper past more jungly scenes towards a truly impressive cave with multiple rooms and a bamboo raft ride through a cave filled with bats.

The next day we took our mopeds a bit further in search of waterfalls and the much-renowned Pai Canyon. We were told there was no point trying to find a waterfall during dry season, but the girl that told us this admitted she had not been to any waterfalls herself. My advice to you is: don't take any traveler's advice who openly admits they haven't done something themselves. We went to a waterfall and there was plenty of water. So much water, in fact, that we were able to climb up the side of the waterfall and jump off into a deep pool without touching the bottom.

Pai Canyon is apparently better enjoyed for sunset, and I admit going in the heat of a Thailand afternoon was a bit too much. I could not do much exploring as it was very exposed wandering around the sheer, sandy cliffs. While we were there the military and police arrived, apparently a girl in a white tee-shirt got lost some where out there or potentially fell and I couldn't help but wonder about how awful that would be at that time of day.

Ultimately though, Pai is an incredible and ethereal place to visit. You can easily make friends from all over the world who will be visiting for similar pursuits and most-likely have a free-spirited mentality. There is much to explore in the nearby areas and mopeds are cheap to rent. However, I did notice many foreigners with thick bandages around their feet, legs, arms and even one around their chin--so if you do opt for a moped, be careful on the mountain roads as it is far too easy to have an accident and get hurt. As Josh put it to me, "driving a moped is the most dangerous thing you'll do in Thailand." Sage advice worth remembering.