Pai

Woke up and met up with Dave as we still had a couple of hours left before we had to take the bikes back. We pretty much did the exact same route as the previous day except we didn't have the girls on the back so we where able to throw it round the corners a bit harder going up and down the hill. I realised pretty quickly that dave is a lot quicker/better/mental than me as he shot off into the distance and I couldn't/wouldn't keep up with him. He stoped half way up the hill though and we discussed grip distribution, braking limits and a few other bike related stuff then headed back down the hill in unisen. Both bikes had ABS (something neither of us had used before) so we where really happy with the stopping power at our disposal, but the bikes had clearly been used by lots of weekend warrior tourists as the wheels where squared off so I couldn't really lean into the corners as much as I would have on my own bike. We dropped the bikes off and said our goodbyes to Dave and Laura who were heading to bangkok whilst we went to Pai. I went in the bus with Laura and Manny and the welsh decided to ride their mopeds there. I was a little jealous on the drive there as the roads where really crazy so it would have been fun on bikes, but at the same time I think I might have died! Plus I needed to put in some ground work with Laura who was clearly a bit pissed about the previous night. On arrival at Pai the dorm spicy Pai had massively over booked so the welsh stayed in a tent whilst me and Laura got a mini villa. I was chuffed as after two nights of sneaking around the dorms trying to keep quiet I wanted to have a place to ourselves. So we went out for a meal and I made up for putting my foot in it the previous night. Twice.

The next day we rented a moped and plodded around the nearby waterfalls most of the day, did a we bit of shopping, had the worst massage of my life, and headed out for a meal with a few of the guys from Spicy. I still had a niggling issue with meeting new people (I spoke about it in my blog post on the cooking course) where I was fed up with having the same conversations with people. I even decided to play a game with one of the people from spicy that we would go up to a complete stranger and instead of starting with "Hi, where are you from", just bust out something like "so where's the most interesting place you've had sex?!". So I decided to check out medatation places and got recomended to a buddhist temple between Pai and Mei Hong Song that took in westerens, fed them, tought them meditation, gave them somewhere to sleep and all for nothing (but donations where appreciated). So as Laura was heading back to Chang Mai the following day we had one last night together :-(. We talked about meeting up at some point in Laos but that didn't really pan out how I expected....

Pai was a cool place and if you're a hippy who likes sitting around getting stoned all day you're in heavon. But I'm not, so I headed off to be a monk.....