Big Trip Day 60: Motorbikes and Meditation (Part 1!)
Hey friends and family!
It’s Dory here, tagging back in for my turn on the newsletter. I’m writing from a coffee shop in Koh Lanta, an island in Southern Thailand where we’ve been posted up for a week for some much anticipated ocean time! But more on that later – today’s update is about our final few weeks inland, exploring Chiang Mai and the nearby mountains.
For the curious, I’m also adding pin drops to a Google list in real time, so if you’ve got Southeast Asia travels planned or just love reading restaurant reviews, you can see a lot of the places we’ve been here!
Also: the first draft of this newsletter was so long even I couldn't stand it. As such, Motorbikes and Meditation has been broken into two parts, which we'll send a few days apart. This is part one: Motorbikes!
Motorbikes come cheap in Asia, but it turns out that, like with most things, you get what you pay for. Our previous rental scooters were $5 and $6 a day respectively, and about as underpowered and uncomfortable as a gas-powered vehicle can be. For what felt to us like the truly tremendous sum of $8 a day, we spent a week near Chiang Mai riding a basically new Honda Click 125 – that’s 125cc’s of raw, unadulterated scooter power, baby.
But truly, it made a huge difference on the steep grades and tight curves of the Mae Hong Song Loop, a 600 kilometer loop through the mountains near the Thailand/Burma border which we originally planned to do all of, then half of... and that in the end we did about ⅕ of because we got sucked into a mountain lodge for spelunkers.
But I’ll start at the beginning; here’s an overview of...
Our Extremely Partial Attempt at the Mae Hong Song Loop
Our first day on the loop started auspiciously. We got delicious coffees in Chiang Mai – a Korean-inspired coffee shop near our hostel sold me a yuzu americano that I’ll think about for the rest of my life – and the scooter rental place gave us helmets that actually fit our heads properly (a first!) We were on the road by 10am, which for us is basically an alpine start.
The drive out of Chiang Mai was a little harrowing; it’s a proper city, with proper city traffic, and Thailand drives on the left side of the road. Despite occasionally being overwhelmed with terror that we were about to get in a head-on collision (because we kept forgetting that cars on the right were not actually in our lane,) Justin masterfully scooted us out of town, and we started heading up into the hills. All those miles in Laos really set us up for success in the much more developed and organized roadscape of Thailand.
For lunch we stopped at a promising-looking roadside restaurant for khao soi, the northern Thai curry soup that we ate every chance we got. Yellow egg noodles, a tender chicken drumstick, aromatic red curry broth, lime, raw shallots, pickled greens, and a sprinkle of fried noodles on top. This one cost just over a dollar, and immediately reminded us of what drew us back to Thailand in the first place: noodle soup we actually wanted to eat!
A little further down the road we decided to take a break at Mok Fa Waterfall. We almost skipped it because of the steep admission (200 baht per adult, plus 20 more for scooter parking!) but a quick conversation confirmed that a.) it’s not that expensive, b.) we should be paying, since we’re visitors here, and c.) we have never regretted swimming. We made the left turn.
The waterfall wasn’t busy; a few other foreigners and some Thai folks, all of us taking our personal versions of waterfall glamour shots, smiling into the sunshine. Eventually a group of elementary-school-aged Thai kids showed up to take turns belly-flopping into the shallow water and pushing each other into the waterfall. Justin briefly became a celebrity when he showed them that you can easily swim right under where the waterfall strikes the pool – cultural ambassadorship at its best! We swam and people-watched and soaked up the sunshine, and then hopped back on the scooter to wrap up our drive.
The driving on the Mae Hong Song Loop is famous, and rightfully so. The highway is broad and perfect, smooth asphalt as far as the eye can see. It’s also delightfully and sometimes outrageously curvy, hairpin turns stacked on each other for miles on end. We climbed and descended jungle-draped mountains, and before we knew it we were at our final stop – a coffee with a nice view – and reached the saddle where the highway drops down into Pai.
Paipocalypse
The headline on Pai seems to be that you either love it or you hate it. As we crested the spot where the road drops down into the city, we realized that we were already biased to land on the hating side of things: we were looking down at the worst soup of smoke we’ve seen anywhere in Southeast Asia.
Slash and burn season is an annual cycle in Northern Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Burma, and the smoke from so many small farmers preparing their rice fields for the rainy season has devastating effects on regional air quality. Most sources we follow suggested that smoke season starts in March, so we thought we were sneaking in right under the wire, and that we’d be safely ensconced in the beaches of Southern Thailand by the time things got bad. Whelp, due to some combination of climate change and bad luck, smoke season started early this year, and we descended the road into Pai to a delicious AQI of 175.
As we dropped into the smoke, we passed active burns in hillside rice fields. One of our first landmarks was the turnoff for Pai Canyon, a viewpoint with approximately one million scooters in the parking lot, and two million 20-year-old scantily clad tourists wandering down the road to see the (presumably socked in) view. The outskirts of Pai had a distinct dusty frontier town vibe. Where was the stuff? Where was the town itself? Doing our best to withhold judgment, we turned up the hill to our hostel where we’d booked a room for the criminally high rate of $15.
The hostel yard was truly and utterly abandoned. Imagine tumbleweeds. Imagine ghosts. It’s the end of the dry season, so everything is a little crispy, but this place was crispy in a haunted way. The grass? Brown. The dust? Everywhere. The landscaping? Deceased. There were a few signs of human habitation – shoes in front of a dorm room, a shirt hanging off the railing of a bungalow – but the only living creature we could find was an eerily calm puppy. After parking the scooter and taking in the decrepit sights, the smoke casting the sunset orange, Justin announced “I fucking hate this place.”
This turned out to be an apt assessment of Pai.
The town is best described as hippie Cancun. An endless stream of tourists, mostly young and wearing swimsuits as clothes (we are nowhere near a beach,) a heavy fog of weed smoke, street vendors selling curry puffs and dumplings, and young men trying to beckon you into blacklit bars with promises of “mushroom shakes good price.” Wandering the streets of Pai with a growing sense of horror, I noted that this seemed like a good place to get roofied.
That night back at our hostel, an extremely intoxicated Thai-American guy from Portland plopped down at the table outside our room and told us the story of how he recently crashed his scooter:
He had just gotten off a call with his divorce attorney and was feeling reckless; helmetless, with his headphones in, he rode his rental scooter up to an overlook and drank “just one beer, honestly.” On the way back to the hostel at dusk, taking the turns at maximum speed, he hit loose gravel and slid out, somehow tumbling around and taking the brunt of the fall on his wrist (he later found out it was broken.)
As he popped to his feet, shell-shocked and disoriented, he realized a Thai family in a pick-up truck had been coming up the hill towards him just as he crashed. The family had pulled over, and a man came up to ask him if he was okay. Aghast, our new friend felt the Thai manners his mom had hammered into him as a kid kick in: “I was bleeding and my scooter was halfway across the road, but all I could think to do was just start wai-ing at this guy, apologizing for almost dying in front of his family.”
Days later, after attempting to tough it out, a delayed x-ray led to a cast on his broken hand. A few days after that, he cut the cast off himself because he had a fresh tattoo on his forearm, “and that thing itched like hell.”
At some point our new friend ran out of steam, and wandered off to another part of the hostel in search of more beers. We went to sleep to the sound of continued partying, woke up at 7am to the orange-red dawn of abysmal air quality, and got the hell out of Pai.
We’re Cave People Now
After thirty minutes of driving, we were above the Pai smoke and back into good-but-not-great air quality. We stopped at a cave where we met a German girl driving the loop in the opposite direction, who had booked four non-refundable nights in Pai. It was here that we began our Anti-Pai information Campaign, a project that continues to this day. She pledged to try and change her reservation based on our reviews, and told us that the air quality only improves further along the loop – good news that we ended up never actually needing, because our final destination proved to be only another hour down the road.
Lonely Planet and Travelfish both spoke enthusiastically about Cave Lodge, a restaurant and set of bungalows a few kilometers off the main road. What we didn’t realize was that it isn’t just a cute name – Cave Lodge is well, all about caves. The lodge’s Australian owner moved here in the early 80s, met and married a Shan Thai woman who was Chiang Mai’s first female trekking guide, and the two of them built this place and went on to discover over 100 caves in the region. Today, Cave Lodge is a magical spot on the banks of a slow-flowing river, 20 minutes from Tham Lod Cave (home to 200,000 cave-adapted swifts, a fruit bat colony, and the biggest catfish I’ve ever seen) and launching point for countless cave trips, whitewater adventures, and days spent reading books in hammocks.
We loved it here, so much so that this is where our attempt at the Mae Hong Song Loop ended. We spent four days at Cave Lodge, hanging out with a small group of other travelers, sleeping deeply in the cool mountain temps, and becoming Cave People.
The most noteworthy underground experience we had was in Tham Nam Hoo, a cave first explored by the Cave Lodge founder in the 80’s. Our guide for the day was a local guy named Kai, who’s been living in this region and exploring caves since he first followed his mom (a guide at Tham Lod, where all visitors are required to book a local guide to take them inside) into the caves at age 5. Kai and the Cave Lodge signage both call Tham Nam Hoo the most beautiful cave in Thailand, and while I’m no expert, I’m prone to agree.
In our six hours underground, Kai led us through a quick-flowing underwater river, and we gazed up at ice white flowstone and oceans of needle-sharp black-streaked stalactites. We saw cave crickets and cockroaches and spiders shimmering with eye-shine in the dark, and two gray-speckled cave frogs. The cave was tall like a desert canyon, the roof often impossibly remote, and after a few hours it was possible to almost convince yourself you were simply canyoneering at night – until we all paused to turn off our headlamps, and the darkness fell so completely that there was no denying our inside-the-planet status.
We re-emerged blinking into the world at nearly sunset; now, when we look out at the karst hills, we’re always thinking about what’s happening underneath.
Our last night at Cave Lodge, Justin was knocked out by a mystery illness – our best guess is that submerging his head at the swimming hole the day before might have let something icky into his digestive system, since it’s the only thing we didn’t both do or eat. After a sleepless night and a late morning drinking Pedialite gifted by one of our traveler friends, he reached some semblance of recovery.
And then, like a true legend, Justin drove us four hours back to Chiang Mai on the scooter. This episode confirmed that I can no longer delay learning how to drive a motorbike, so that’s the next task on my to-do list.
Back in Chiang Mai, we re-sorted our gear for the next morning’s departure: onward to the Northern Vipassana Center at Wat Chomtong, where we’d be at a silent meditation retreat for the next eight days.
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Thanks for following along on Big Trip. We love and miss you all, and are sending you lots of good vibes! If you haven't yet, please text us or email back and let us know what you're up to. It's so nice to keep in touch while we're on the move.
Love,
Dory & Justin
