Pai

The morning after we returned from the trek we caught a hellish minibus ride to Pai. Pai had been billed in the Rough Guide to SE Asia as a bit of a mecca for travellers so we thought we had to check it out. We had trouble finding accommodation though, probably because Pai has obviously become more popular in recent years, hence nice guesthouses being out of our price range, and the fact that the festval of lights was not far away, so Thai people would be travelling to Pai too. We settled on the second guesthouse we viewed- Charlie's, 3 beds in a 5 bed dorm, a short outdoor stroll away from the shower/toilet block. Mark & I spent the first few days feeling totally wiped out from our tummy bug, so Innes was pretty bored. We hired some bikes and rode/ trekked to a local "waterfall" the first day Mark & I felt well enough to do so, unfortunately we hadn't left enough time and didn't get to the waterfall before we had to turn back so we'd get back to our bikes in daylight. On the plus side none of the people we passed going the other way had actually got there either, the path becoming the river and getting pretty trecherous from then on. This little escapade opened up some horrid little cuts on my feet courtesy of my merrels, and set me back a bit with my recovery: lesson learned. The night before we were due to leave for Chiang kong we found a bar showing the football, Mellow Yelow, a really nice chilled out place as I guess the name suggests. Still not 100% I stuck to snacky foods garlic bread (way too literal...) etc. Mark & Innes both had rice.....which was a bit cold. The next morning they both had food poisoning, at first the poor things could only stagger as far as the door before vomitting in the strategically placed flowerbed. I cancelled the minibus &spent most of the day in the bakery. On one of my visits to check on them I found a dog with its nose in the pile of sick, eating it, and on the way out I saw it was giving its master (Charlie, presumably) doggy kisses all over his face. Urgh! We eventually left Pai, after spending a week there.