Seeing the light

I will forever remember Pai as a place of revelation. I was warned in advance by several parties that there’s something of the vortex about Pai. You plan to stay for one day, you wind up here for a week. You plan to stay for a week, you wind up here for a month. Something in the air, etc etc. If there’s a pinch of Byron Bay in the Chiang Mai mix, there’s a whopping great spoonful of Nimbin (without the junkies on the street) in Pai. This is the main bridge across town…

Little town, pitched on a slow moving river, surrounded by lush rainforest and rice paddies. As far as accommodation goes, there’s a wide range of cheap bamboo bungalows to choose from and then some slightly ritzier digs near the hot springs up the road. I’m staying in the Sun Huts, where all the huts are named after planets; the Unicorn Huts (‘one big Family’), Rainbow Huts and the Lazy Chair bar and restaurant are located nearby, as are the Pai Treehouses and some centre called the Natural Mystic. There’s plenty of puns on the name of the town too: Cinema Pairadiso, Pairadise, Pai in the Sky… but no Pai-ning for the fjords, in spite of the heat. The fact that Pai rhymes with high hasn't escaped the punsters either. All round, it’s pretty herbal and people from all around the world come to Pai seeking some sort of revelation.
The life is a journey not a destination crowd are particularly well represented here; Japanese and Israeli karma counters constitute some sort of demographic hump. You can get a pair of traditional fringed leather moccasins made here although whose traditions are being followed I know not. Lots of people are working hard to give folk music a very bad name, sighing and yeah-yiiieaah-yeahing their way through some ill-advised covers. I did a yoga workshop with a childless woman who called herself Mama. It’s resolutely off-the-beaten track. One company selling treks into the hilltribe villages offers a 50% refund if you see other tourists. Inexplicably the same operation also advertised mental help as part of the package. I sat in a café called ‘The Witching Well’ (hold your fire, they work some serious voodoo magic with cocoa and cinnamon and call the result Mexican hot chocolate) and flicked through some of the books on the bookshelf. Information on Wicca, shamanism (the Amazonian, rather than the Nordic or Siberio-Mongolian varieties being favoured), and my old favourite, reiki, was available in abundance. If I wanted to, I could read The Celestine Prophecy here and follow it up with The Teachings of Don Juan. It’s extremely beautiful here, I’m quite relaxed and my defences are down but I’m not ready for that level of enlightenment. Noooonono, not just yet.

What is it then that has been revealed to me in Pai? Are you now reading the blog of a healer? Am I going to start extolling the virtues of wormwort which hasn't been turned into absinthe? Has my totem amphibian lead me to a tumultuous understanding of my place in the cosmos? None of the above… Amigos, hold on to your hats for a bold truth is approaching…I’ve learnt to ride a motorbike! Yep, I have discarded some of my former inhibitions about being in charge of motorised wheels and got me a motorbike! Sure, it’s a bit of a girly bike, a 125cc automatic number, and it’s hot pink (photo to come) but I have managed to fang my way through the backroads of Pai, visiting waterfalls and temples, without injury to myself or any others.

How on earth did I swing this, you may well ask. Who in their right mind would rent me a motorbike? After so many capable people were unable to teach me to drive, how on earth did I manage to overcome a language barrier and learn to ride a motorbike? I have never ridden a motorbike on my own, I don’t have a driver’s licence, I have the spatial instincts of a drunken mule…

My friends, the truth is, I lied. I lied and bluffed my way into the rental contract and fluked my way out of the gates. I was given a fifteen second refresher lesson in the operation of the vehicle (admittedly not too complicated), took a deep breath and summonsed up all the Menzies-Pike capacities, willing the ancestral technical prowess which had laid dormant, nay morbid, for my entire life, to spring to the surface, and somehow managed miraculously to start the putterpuss and ride off before they realised their mistake. A little automatic bike isn’t too hard to negotiate but, as much as I enjoy the egotism of the autodidact, I think I possibly could have done with a little more initial advice. Learning to conjugate Russian verbs on my own? No problem. Figuring out how to slow down, look out for traffic and pedestrians moving in fourteen different directions, stay on the bike and turn around a corner… not entirely unproblematic. I have in the past been a notoriously reluctant recipient of mechanical advice but I confess that a little more help, especially on the turning of corners and the turning of motorbikes right around when one has been travelling in the wrong direction, would have gone a long way. I was pretty bumpy on the old start-stop business for a while there too but now, even though I’m not going to break any land speed records, I think I’ve got the basics licked. The roads are in pretty good shape here and there is very very little traffic. It’s low season, there aren’t many tourists around, and life is pretty slow moving anyway. I wouldn’t say the small children of Pai are necessarily safe, nor would it be entirely true to say that there haven’t been some close shaves with the local bantam population (unpredictable little blighters, chickens).

Watch out! I’m going to get my motorbike licence once I return to the more settled life. I’ve got the Easyrider soundtrack on high rotation in my head (and the last twenty minutes of the film in the denials box). I’m convinced that people will take me very seriously if I ride a motorbike. I’m all ready to tell the sceptics that my great uncle raced motorbikes at Penrith in his teens, so there, it’s in my blood. I have even had the odd delusional thought that I could get a motorbike licence in the UK and then make my travel around Europe a little easier and more exotic but this sounds like too scatterbrained a scheme, even for me, even in Pai.