Tag 335 - 762 curves to Pai

Hello everyone

Our day today started a bit delayed, because there are so many interesting places here and we had trouble prioritizing 😅.

There are great treetop paths here, a sticky waterfall that can be climbed, beautiful viewpoints, the highest mountain in Thailand, and much more!

We already have plans for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and because of the long distances, it was not really feasible to combine multiple things - so we were faced with the question "what do we want to see/do from all the great things?"

When we were on the diving trip in Koh Lanta, we talked to others who gave us tips for Chiang Mai. They told us about a beautiful place nearby, which can be reached by a winding drive and is full of backpackers: Pai.

We really wanted to see this place, but the travel time was indicated as 2 hours and 40 minutes and it was already 10:30 am. It was also not possible to stay there spontaneously, because tomorrow we are driving to Chiang Rai (2 hours and 40 minutes in the other direction) and if we were to stay overnight, we would have a travel time of almost six hours tomorrow... For a day trip, we thought it was too far away...

We went through all possible other options and sights, but we never lost sight of Pai. In the end, we decided to just drive in that direction and see how far we could get.

We set off at around 11 o'clock and headed towards Pai ☺️

I'm the one doing the driving here, I've already gotten used to the right-hand drive Nissan pretty well and driving on the left side of the road is actually going well.

We knew that many curves were ahead of us, because as we read, there were 762 curves in about 130 kilometers. But we didn't expect it to be so extreme ☺️

The route was effectively such that you drove one curve and then immediately into the next one - and that all the way. But what really impressed us was the quality of this road! Clean lines on the ground, good surface and sometimes even two lanes to overtake safely.

The drive was really fun, we also made good progress and there was always something to see on the left and right. Suddenly we saw on the navigation system that we only had one more hour to Pai and agreed to take a look there.

Arriving in Pai, our first stop was at Pai Canyon - Thailand's answer to the Grand Canyon in the USA ☺️

We had lunch there and looked at a part of the canyon. It was really cool there, but in my opinion, the comparison with the Grand Canyon is a bit far-fetched.... However, I must also mention at this point that there is a circular route that we didn't walk - maybe we didn't see the main part ☺️

After enjoying the view a bit, we drove further into the village. It was really very beautiful! Lovingly furnished, there are small shops everywhere, cute restaurants and bars that invite you to linger and you really only see backpackers. We drove right into the middle, parked the car in a side street and later realized that we actually drove through the pedestrian zone! Of course, it was extremely narrow in some places! Typical us...

Because of the further distance to Chiang Rai tomorrow, we decided against staying overnight in the beautiful village and started driving again around 5 pm.

At around 5:45 pm, we made another stop and watched the sunset, which unfortunately played out behind a cloud ☺️

It's amazing how much it cools down in the evening here! During the day it's about 30 degrees and at night it cools down to 9 degrees!

The return trip went smoothly again, we got something from the Mc Drive along the way and arrived back at our hotel around 10 pm.

That's all for today and we'll be back tomorrow 😉

Until then!