zoe in yellow and a lot of other bars in the reggae soi threw another smile party at the lake last night. there was a big main stage with bands and djs between sets and a smaller dance music stage with djs. it was pretty cool! all the beverages were really expensive (500 baht for a small bottle of sangsom?!), which is to be expected from a festival type thing. there were fire dancers and food stalls, and free taxis back and forth from chiang mai city and the lake all night. ticket price was 200 baht, which included a free shot of something.
warm up bar had some sort of party a couple of nights ago. there was free stuff and some people were dressed up in funny costumes. the band that played was pretty decent. at some point one of the singers started bleeding from his head, i have no idea what happened and it was kind of freaky:
the female singer had a really good, really sweet voice:
went back to pai again with some friends, fun times!
a bunch of shots of the road to/from and surrounding mountains:
it’s still suuuuuper dry here, and the mountains are still on fire! i saw this same sight last time i came to pai, which means they’ve been on fire for a couple of weeks now. crazy!
we stayed at a friend’s super cute house a couple of minutes from downtown pai:
the friends i came with are in a jazz band called “alukomarai“, which is kind of a play on words – in thai, “alaiomaruk” (i think) means “i don’t know”. here’s them playing at this really awesome place called edible jazz:
edible jazz is a really cool little bar/cafe/venue situated on temple grounds. they serve excellent vegetarian food, i highly recommend checking it out! plus, you can rent some really cute bungalows that surround it. the view from edible jazz looking out from the inside during the daytime (you can see one of the bungalows on the right and part of the temple in the background):
we also went to this really great hot spring that wasn’t really well known, probably on account of being at the end of this long rough and winding road. here’s my friend navigating down a particularly steep and dusty section (you can get an idea about how incredibly dry it is here right now from how brown the foreground is, verses the green of the background where there’s a mountain stream):
here’s (another really shaky) video of some of the road to the hot spring:
the hot spring itself:
the water was amazingly clear, and the hot spring bed was made up of all these tiny smooth pebbles so even after swimming around it didn’t stir up any sediment. so nice!
taylor swimming in a river:
a spirit house surrounded by wheat grass at a cafe in pai (unfortunately i can’t remember the name of the cafe – the food there is delicious! lots of teas and fresh foods):
view from a temple on one of the mountains looking down onto the city:
