Mae Hong Son Life

Pai Guide: Walking Street, Pai Canyon, Hot Springs and the Quiet Side of the Valley Pai is two towns sharing one valley, and which one you meet depends mostly on what time of day it is. By day it is a small Shan market town in a wide green bowl of rice fields and folded mountains in Mae Hong Son province, about 135 kilometres and 762 famous curves northwest of Chiang Mai — farmers, schoolchildren, monks on their morning round, and travellers moving slowly between cafés. By night, for a few hundred metres of one street, it becomes one of Southeast Asia's classic backpacker parties. Both towns are real, both are worth your time, and the trick to Pai is simply not to mistake either one for the whole place. We are Scott and Jay, based down in Patong, Phuket, where we run a small family condo business, and Pai is the stop on the Mae Hong Son Loop we argue about most fondly — Jay for the markets and the hot springs, Scott for the canyon at sunset and the quiet roads out of the valley...

Mae Hong Son Town Guide: Lakeside Temples, a Hilltop Chedi and Thailand's Quietest Capital There is a moment, arriving in Mae Hong Son town, when travellers check the map to make sure they have not taken a wrong turn into another country. The temples have tiered Burmese roofs instead of Thai gables, the signs carry Shan script alongside Thai, the lake in the middle of town reflects white chedis and golden woodwork, and the whole small capital sits in a green bowl of hills a few kilometres from the Myanmar border, roughly 250 kilometres of mountain road from Chiang Mai. It does not feel like the end of Thailand so much as the beginning of somewhere else entirely — and that, honestly, is the point of coming. We are Scott and Jay, down from Patong, Phuket, where we run a small family condo business, and Mae Hong Son town is the stop on the northern loop we protect most fiercely in our own itineraries. Pai gets the crowds; Mae Hong Son gets the people who drove one more day. This g...

Pang Oung and Ban Rak Thai: A Pine-Ringed Lake and a Yunnan Tea Village Northwest of Mae Hong Son town, one winding mountain road climbs into the ridges along the Myanmar border and delivers, within a few kilometres of each other, the two most photographed places in the province. The first is a still, pine-ringed reservoir where the dawn mist lies on water that mirrors the trees so perfectly that Thailand has nicknamed it its own Switzerland. The second is a village of clay houses and tea gardens around a lake, built by Yunnan Chinese families, where lunch is braised pork leg with steamed buns and the tea in your cup grew on the hillside behind the restaurant. Pang Oung and Ban Rak Thai belong together, and this is our guide to doing them properly — in one trip, on one road, without rushing either. We are Scott and Jay, from Patong, Phuket, where we run a small family condo business, and we will declare our interest plainly: of everything we have seen on our northern trips, the mor...