Welcome to Pai: the village of hippies, cats and mushrooms

My first few days in Pai consisted of an ant infestation, a surprise feline guest and a Stranger Things mushroom trip.

The famous bamboo bridge over the rice field, Pai, Thailand

Mia, Sema and I had booked bus tickets online for 150 baht (£3.36) each to take us to Pai - a small, hipster village up on the mountains - but for some reason, our booking didn’t go through (although the money did) and there weren’t any seats left for us. We had checked out of our accommodations and were stranded at Chiang Mai bus station with our bags. A taxi driver approached us and quoted 2,500 baht (around £56) for a one-way journey to Pai. Mia was really keen to get there, Sema was nonchalant. I figured I should at least try and haggle and put forward 2,000 baht. He laughed and then said he was going to get his friend. A few minutes later, he returned with a woman named Yui who quoted us 2,200 baht (£49.33). I was tempted to try and haggle it down but didn’t feel like I could do it by myself; I needed support. Mia and Sema looked like they were ready to accept the driver’s rate so I gave in too.

A week later, I would read a horrific post on Facebook about how one of the buses from the same company busted a tyre on the steep, narrow and curvy mountain roads, swerved and hit a tree, killing two Brits, causing an amputation of one other person and injuring everyone else. Somehow, the driver was unscathed. Comments would say how accidents like this happened every year; the drivers drove carelessly because they had a quota to meet. I, along with many others, would be afraid of taking the bus back down to Chiang Mai and Facebook groups would be flooded with requests from people going back down to the city and wanting to split the cost of a taxi.

Yui dropped us in front of our guest house, a small glass building on a crossroad. The reception was silently empty. A minute later, a little old lady hobbled down the rustic stairs on the side and checked us in.

The large and spacious room housed a sturdy bunk bed and a single bed in the left corner. Floor to ceiling windows along two adjacent walls showed off green bushes outside back lit by the strong afternoon sun. The air con hummed gently in the back. A small, circular woven table lay in the middle of the room with cushions scattered around it. A TV perched stood on the concrete countertop that wrapped around two of the walls. Hundreds of tiny ants crawled over the red and white tablecloth beneath it. A twinge of discomfort passed through me. I couldn’t leave my toiletries on the countertop so I placed them on a tray above the microwave and made sure to keep everything else zipped up in my suitcase and away from room corners where creepy crawlies were bound to hang out.

There was a cool and shaded spacious hallway leading to a bathroom and a toilet. A large cobweb decorated the far corner of the hallway with a dark spider the size of a 10p coin resting in the middle. I mentally noted the eight-legged creep and made sure to avoid the area for the next three days.

Sema called the single bed. Mia asked if it was okay for her to take the bottom bunk because it was her time-of-the-month and she may need to get up to use the loo in the middle of the night. I said yes, mostly because I had dibbed the front seat in the car. I was happy to have made travel buddies on the trip but I was used to travelling alone and it was strange making decisions with other people and compromising.

The main street was called Walking Street. It consisted of one road, flanked with local shops selling handmade goods, restaurants, scooter hires, bars and a bus station. I was unsure of how I felt. Pai looked like a small town I had been searching for for years, like something out of one of those American dramas or films. But it also felt… claustrophobic. The streets were narrow, the buildings were mostly various shades of brown and felt crowded. Walking around with Sema and Mia prevented me getting my bearings as well as I would have done had I been alone. This was going to take some getting used to.

That evening, we paid 100 baht each and took a red taxi to the Two Huts viewpoint, a gorgeous valley of rolling hills. Ken messaged me while I was on the way to check if I had managed to sleep okay the night before. I was still recovering from jetlag.

'Hey, I miss you,' I replied. 'Slept a few hours. Got to Pai. We're doing a sunset thing now so I'll message you later tonight. Love you (as a friend..! 👀) xx'

'Haha okay sure thing, talk to you later and enjoy the sunset, miss you too 😊'

I told Ken I loved him when I was at Shang Hai airport. I wasn't in love with him of course, we had only known each other for a week. But I felt love for him. He was just such a good guy, whichever way I looked at him. Easy-going, intelligent, funny, cute and great to talk with. And I believed if I thought or felt positively about someone, I should tell them. Spread the love because the world needed it. I was aware he never said it back to me but I was okay with it.

Ten minutes later, when we arrived at the viewpoint, I couldn't help but send him a couple of videos and the conversation restarted.

A bar serving drinks sat on one end and the two wooden huts sat on the other, erected several metres in the air on sticks. We got our drinks and walked carefully up the creaky steps - thoughts of health and safety flitted through my mind - and found a spot at the front corner of the platform. A group of people sat behind us sharing a bong. Perhaps a hundred other people sat scattered around on the grass below us, talking, laughing, drinking. The twang of a guitar reverberated across the open space. Someone whistled along briefly. The sky was a pale orange against the dark rolling hills.

And later that night, when we returned to Walking Street, we had fun picking out and sharing street food for dinner and checking out a small bar with live music. Mia, who could sing and play the piano, knew all the songs the guy was singing and thought he was great. I thought he sounded miserable. He reminded me a little of Alex Band from The Calling (except I quite liked Wherever You Will Go). Mia's friend from Chiang Mai, a blond haired, blue eyed Irish named Damien joined us. Something about him vaguely resembled Shane, a friend back home. It was probably the accent but they also shared a similar down-to-earth personality. I was pretty tired and wanted to go back to the guesthouse and just talk with Ken so bid them farewell soon after. Evenings were a good time for Ken and I because it was when he finished work (with the UK being seven hours behind) and I was about to fall asleep but not quite due to the jetlag.

‘I’m currently being a bed-potato, short break away from my desk,’ he wrote.

‘What’s that? Sounds cute and edible’

‘Haha it’s me lying on my bed, just browsing the internet on my phone for a bit’

Come Sunday morning, Sema packed up her bags to leave for Vietnam while I committed to jogging and strength training for the first time since arriving to Thailand. My stamina was surprisingly good; I did my usual twenty minutes with ease. The strength training on the other hand, was a challenge. After Sema left, Mia went to get a massage, allowing me the luxury of having the guest house all to myself. I showered off the sweat from the exercise and the morning humidity and played my favourite Bollywood track - Yaad Piya Ki Aane Lagi - out loud. Shimmying my hips a little, fantasising dancing to this song in front of an audience, I unwrapped my towel from around me and swung it over the rail in the hallway. The top of my towel hit something dangling through the planks of wood that made up the ceiling. A bushy tail slithered back up. I screamed and ran out into the living room-bedroom naked. What the fuck was that? I felt disgusted. It must be a Thai equivalent to a possum or something. I had left my oil on the shelf in the hallway. I paused, then slipped in, grabbed it and ran out, slamming the door shut behind me. After hastily moisturising myself and throwing on some clothes, I ran out to the reception.

'Excuse me,' I called to the old lady from the doorway.

She looked up with a friendly smile.

'There's something in the room.' I indicated for her to follow me.

We walked through the small courtyard and into the guest house, through the living room-bedroom where I stopped short of the closed door leading into the hallway. I pointed at the door. She opened it and went inside. I pointed to the ceiling.

She looked up and said some words in Thai. I cautiously walked in and looked up to see two large eyes staring back at me through the dark gaps between the planks of wood. It was a cat.

'She stay there in the day,' she said. 'When it too hot.'

A small laugh escaped my mouth. 'Okay… Thank you.'

The lady left with a smile. So I freaked out over a house cat. But this place was teeming with tiny ants and spiders so my discomfort was heightened. And the way the cat's tail had slinked up - there was even a slithering noise - it was like something out of a horror film. Mia was leaving the next day - there was no way I was going to stay here by myself. So I spent the rest of the day walking around looking for a new accommodation.

Mia text me a few hours later. She was going to do mushrooms with some of the guys we had met on tour yesterday, did I want to join?

'Sure, I'm still house hunting, I'll join you guys in about an hour.'

All the accommodations I saw looked outdated and they seemed to have tiny gaps in them that allowed creepy crawlies to come in and make themselves at home with me. A local guy recommended a hotel which sat by the river five minutes away from Walking Street. It was overpriced and the accommodation less attractive than the photos online. Nearby was another hotel, Pai Nai Fun. The reception-dining area was a large open space that overlooked the brown river that ran through Pai. A wobbly but sturdy bamboo bridge connected the hotel to the village centre five minutes away. They had a private room with a bathroom for 1,300 baht a night (around £29). If I booked four consecutive nights, I would get 10% discount. This was expensive for me. My budget was around £10/night for a private room (couldn’t do dorms anymore) but I was tired of looking. The bedroom was nice and clean, modern, and most importantly, sealed tight so no creepy crawlies getting in. Plus breakfast was included. So I accepted with the intention of looking somewhere cheaper another day, and headed to Sunset Bar to meet Mia and co. The bar was a twenty-minute walk away from the village centre. It was around 5pm, sunset was in about an hour and daylight had softened. The bar was empty on the ground floor; I ordered a mushroom shake, drank half - it tasted pleasantly fruity as opposed to earthy - and made my way up the stairs. The roof top was a large, open space, no actual walls but hip-level gates prevented drunk or high people from falling down and breaking their necks. Small sofas and chairs were scattered around the room. Mia and Shannon, a lady we met on the tour yesterday, sat on the sofa on the right. Damien, Mia’s blond-haired blue-eyed Irish friend sat on a sofa by himself on the far left of the room. Shannon's husband lay dozing on the love seat in the back corner. A Caucasian guy with a moustache that I had not met before sat in the middle.

'What time did you guys take the shrooms?' I asked. 'How long does it take to kick in? Are you guys high yet? I'm wondering how behind I am.'

Mia and Shannon looked at me and started laughing. A tinge of embarrassment heated my face.

'Your energy,' she said slowly. 'How comes your glass is half empty?'

'I drank half already.'

I sat down on an empty chair between Mia and Moustache. Everyone was quiet and staring out at the treetops, the beginning of an orange sunset emerging. I couldn't wait to feel high. I had tried mushrooms only once before with a friend, Nuz, about a month before I left London. We went to Greenwich Park, sat on a small hill and took one-and-a-half block of shroom chocolate. It was delicious and so was the trip. I felt good, happy, I laughed, the highs came in waves, the trees looked very three dimensional and vibrant, their arms waved at me, the clouds parted to reveal a pink-blushed sky and for some reason, I was mildly turned on and we talked about sex a lot. I wondered if that was a normal effect of the shrooms. At the end, when the sun started to set and the shrooms started to wear off, we decided to head into a bar for a drink. I felt a little sad that I was leaving London and my new friend who I liked a lot. Nuz was intelligent, honest, brave and very interested in her Indian-Bengali culture and community. I really admired how openly she spoke of her insecurities. A few weeks earlier, she had invited me to her birthday picnic - around a dozen other people turned up, it was fun and I felt like I was part of a group of friends - something I hadn't experienced much since secondary school. A part of me didn't want to leave London.

Fast forward a month later, and here I was with some new friends and one American stranger with a moustache, doing shrooms again. A wave of mild dizziness hit me. My joints felt weak, almost like I had pins and needles. My body felt relaxed.

'Think I'm high guys,' I said to the room at large. My arms felt like jelly.

The azaan (Islamic call to prayer) went off in the distance. There was a noticeable Muslim community here in Pai which I was surprised about. Families set their stalls up every evening selling an array of delicious street food. Kids helped their parents, the smaller ones hung around in the back playing with each other. There was also a mosque on the main road.

Someone somewhere in the room said they stayed near a mosque once and the azaan woke them up every morning at sunrise. Moustache made a joke about recording the azaan and mixing it with a beat, then setting it as his alarm to wake up for work. Everyone, including me, laughed.

'It's actually a controversial thing to do,' I said. 'It's a religious call to prayer and doing something like that can be seen as disrespectful. Although Australian beat boxer Tom Thum has already done that. Don't know of any complaints though.'

Moustache didn't seem to have anything to say. He was giving me douchebag vibes. He had spoken to me briefly earlier, I couldn't remember what he had said, but I got the feeling he was slyly taking the mick out of me and that he did that with a lot of people. I didn't mind too much; I had grown to feel quite comfortable with myself over the years. I reminded myself that I had friends and family back home who accepted me for who I was but there must've been a small part of me that did feel unease because later, when a wave hit, I felt a greater discomfort and awkwardness mostly because of him, and partially due to being in the presence of people I had only known for a day - so basically strangers. I had only known Mia six days so could I call her a friend too? The sky had darkened - there was barely any sunlight left - and behind the black treetops, there was a row of white buildings.

'This looks like a part of east London to me,' I said to the room. 'The white buildings, looks like a row of terraced houses in Walthamstow or something.' I recalled driving around late at night with Sarah, Noor and M a week before I had left. It was well past midnight and we drove to a random corner shop, bought some bread and fed them to the swans in the lake. Sarah was a night owl and I, an early bird. But the weeks leading up to my departure, I decided to sacrifice my sleep to spend time with friends and family.

'It's actually a hotel and the architecture was inspired by Greece,' said Mia.

'Looks like London to me.'

'It's Greece.'

Between the treetops, the lower half of a woman's jaw grinning to reveal perfect white teeth floated into my vision. Each dip had the same jaw replicated. I counted about five. It annoyed me. 'I keep seeing a row of a woman's jaw smiling at me.' My arms semi-flopped around in front of me as I spoke. 'I don't like it; I want it to fuck off.'

Someone laughed. Great black figures rose from the treetops, like giant men rising out of the ground slowly. I watched with fascination. It reminded me of one of Gorillaz music videos. And to my right, a tree, once a mundane green, now a deep red, velvet in texture, the leaves bulbous in shape. It made me uncomfortable. I had seen this before; I had been here before but I didn't know when. It felt like a distant memory long forgotten over time, or perhaps an experience my mind had buried deep to protect me. Or maybe it was one of the many independent art galleries I had explored in London. Some artist must've done shrooms and depicted it on their canvas and hung it up for the whole world to see. How long had I been high? Half an hour? It felt like two hours, maybe three. Time seemed to move differently, slowly.

The white buildings behind the trees made me feel a hint of homesickness. Not a lot, it wasn't overwhelming, just some kind of sadness. I was mentally preparing myself to cut ties with London, to leave the UK and stay long term - if not permanently - in Asia. The shrooms were making me confront this - the end of a great chapter and the beginning of a new one.

Moustache said something about being hit with some past trauma and the mushrooms helping him to confront it and dump it. According to him, it was healthy.

Besides me, Mia laughed and wiped her eyes with tissue. 'I don’t know why but my eyes keep leaking.'

Thoughts whirled around my head, like cries in a cave, echoing round and round, bouncing off the walls. I was aware I had aged this year, the signs were evident on my face and body and it bothered me. I was in another dimension and it felt lonely, or something like loneliness but not quite. Fragments of art, films and characters I had come across floated around and I felt like I understood them differently, more deeply. Music played quietly from the speakers. The guys took the mick. I couldn't stop laughing. The wave passed. And then came again. I didn't really know where I was but I was acutely aware that I was with a group of near-strangers and discomfort I may have felt on a minute level magnified. I felt like I wasn't getting the occasional jokes between us. I didn't fit in. I reminded myself that I normally hung with an authentic crowd and I didn't need to fit in with everyone. I felt odd. Something I had never felt before. I didn't have the words to describe it. It was alien. It was neither positive nor negative. I wasn't connected to anyone or anything but it wasn't lonely or isolating, it was something else altogether. I kind of didn't want to feel this anymore but didn't have a real opinion on it either - it was weird - and I didn't know when it would end. The intellectual part of me told me I should try and get some kind of normality. I was in another dimension and I knew I shouldn't be there; humans did not belong there. I was feeling things a human should not feel. This was what it must be like to be a jinn or something of the sort. But I didn't know what I needed to feel normal again. The intellectual part of me told I should go to Walking Street and have some street food like I had done every other night. I enjoyed that. Then go back to the guest house and talk with Ken. I didn't know what normal was, what goodness was. I thought it was having friends and a family. But I no longer knew. Who made up the concept of family and why was it considered a good thing? Was it because we placed the idea and feeling of goodness on family? What if the concept never existed? What if we were just individual creatures that roamed the earth. Like jinns. I shook my head. I didn't know anything. We thought we knew things but really, we knew nothing.

Some English guy I met at the hot spring yesterday messaged me to come to Paradise Bar to see the fire dance. I told the guys the fire dance was starting and we all traipsed down the dirt road in the dark, following the light and sounds of Paradise Bar about 50 metres down. We ordered drinks and stood on the side, watching some guy spin a couple of poi balls round and round and round. I sipped my banana shake quickly and once I had finished, decided to leave quietly. These people, this bar, this space, none of it was for me. Even if I wasn't on shrooms, it wouldn't have been my scene anyway. The fire show felt commercial. I walked back down the dirt path in the dark, using my phone light to illuminate the way. Walking Street was a good twenty minutes away. I was going to practice self-love by eating some street food and then maybe getting a foot massage. This was what I enjoyed and hopefully would help ease me back to reality. I shook my head as I walked. Nothing really made sense. I felt out of touch with this world.

I quickly text Mia to let her know I had left.

'Feel weird, heading back and gonna try and do something normal like get some street food and talk to Ken to shake off this 'Stranger Things' vibe off me. Hope you and the guys have fun x'

'OK!!! I'll be back later and if you need a hug let me know because I probably do too!'

'Just so weird and I don't know shit. If I'm awake when you return, let's hug it out.'

'I was crying a lot honestly, I think for people with an anxious brain like ours, it's hard when you first start doing stuff like this. I was laughing and then it would turn to tears.'

'I'm afraid it may have ruined my relationship with Pai. Let's talk later, I'm still not a hundred percent out of it. I want to do normal stuff so gonna hang in Walking Street for a bit. Don't worry about me x'

'OK eat something for sure. And seriously, I'm here for you if you need!!'

I had finally reached the bright lights and hubbub of Walking Street. People milled around, occasionally stopping at food stalls, looking, talking with their friends, deciding if they wanted what was on offer, maybe buying, sometimes wandering off. I saw a stall selling samosas. Could be good. Unfortunately, they weren't. They lacked flavour and were filled with oil. Disappointed but with no tummy room left, I eyed a massage place. One hour foot massage for 150 baht (£3.36). The old lady welcomed me in with a smile and indicated for me to sit down. The door shut, semi-drowning out the noise from the street. I let her do her thing while I looked through the glass door at people passing by, illuminated by the street lights. A young Thai dad walked by carrying a little boy in his arm. This was something I would have found beautiful and appreciated but I felt nothing. I was devoid of emotions but I wasn't empty either. I was just nothing. Tears leaked out of my eyes. I didn’t know if I would ever feel normal again.