Pai (Thailand)

For years I had heard about Pai: a small town tucked into the mountains of Northwestern Thailand and just a few hours from Chiang Mai. I first heard people talk about it when I was backpacking through SE Asia back in 2014 after finishing my time teaching in South Korea. I understood it to be one of those undiscovered hippie wonderlands that have popped up so commonly across Southeast Asia over the years. But I know full well that many of these places eventually become overcommercialized and overdeveloped for tourism.

Despite this, I didn't go to Pai with a very clear image of what it might actually be like. Our van snaked through the mountains, curve by curve, at a pace that I thought was just outside of what might be considered safe. The petite Brazilian woman sitting next to me, who was so animated and proud of herself for having taken Dramamine prior to the van, ended the ride by puking into a plastic bag. Even as someone who has never really experienced motion sickness, I got out of the van with an uneasy, disoriented feeling. 

As I was trying to shake that feeling after the van had finally arrived, I made my way down the main street in the center of Pai. Every night this street turns into a market. You can find everything from grilled snacks to jars of weed. I made my way down the street and eventually got to my accommodation, Villa de Pai. I can't recommend them enough! The bungalow I rented was only 450 baht (approximately $13 at the time of writing) per night. Although the property was almost right next to the main street, the bungalows were tucked deeper into the property, shielding the bungalows from much of the street noise that was at full swing late into the night. Nonetheless, the almost nightly booming of the stereos of the Boom Bar across the street could easily be heard.

After checking in, I wandered up and down the market street. I bought an impressively large fried chicken bahn mi sandwich that was barely able to fit into my mouth. Of note were the vendors with carts set up selling a wide array of weed products including flower, edibles, and joints. I bought a joint and some edibles in the form of cookies. I wondered over to the Boom Bar to have a beer and smoke my joint before winding down for the night.

I had heard that mushroom shakes were very easy to come by in Pai. Namely, there were two bars right next to each other and a 10-15 minute walk from the center of town that served these fungal treats. At the end of my first full day in Pai, I made my way toward Sunset Bar, which I was told had the best mushroom shakes between them and their next-door rival Paradise Bar. At 4:30 p.m., I was the only one there and a woman asked what I wanted. I saw the sign for a full or half-glass of the magical mushroom shake. I asked for a full one. She went to the back. A young Thai guy with glassy eyes came out and we chatted until the woman came back. He asked where I came from. Once I told him I was from the United States, he told me that he thought I looked Mexican.

I said, "I guess it's the mustache?"

As he stifled laughter he said, "Yea, maybe."

After the woman returned, I chugged the entire plastic bottle of ice-cold green liquid. It tasted like some type of fruit juice that I wasn't able to put my finger on.

I thanked them and made my way back to the bungalow to get comfortable. Once I noticed the "glow" and the vivid colors that animated my laptop screen and my surroundings, I figured it was probably starting. 

I closed the curtains, put in my earbuds, and closed my eyes. After some time, I started to notice the music's deft use of space. If I imagined my head to be a sphere, there were sounds that were appearing at different points in that sphere. Perhaps there was one that sounded like it was in the "back" of the sphere. Others sounded like they were on the "right" or "left" sides of the sphere. Some sounds would weave back and forth between the left and right sides, which I would think of as a streamer or a sparkler being moved back and forth by human hands. The two albums that had the most striking uses of "shape" were Crush by Floating Points and At Scaramouche by Shabason & Krgovich. Over the course of the two nights, these are the albums I kept returning to:

• Jon Hopkins - Music for Psychedelic Therapy
• Clams Casino & Jazztronik - Winter Flower Reimagined
• Floating Points - Crush
• Shabason & Krgovich - At Scaramouche
• Lynn Avery - To Live & Die in Space & Time
  
• nueen - Diagrams of Thought
  
• Pinic - creaky little branch
  
• Ulla - foam
• Cole Pulice - Scry and Strawberry Roan

The first night was a stronger trip with much more vivid imagery from my imagination. I imagined that I was deep in the rainforest and these two tribesmen were escorting me to a cave where I would face and overcome my fear. The tribesmen wore wooden masks, which at first seemed to be nothing particularly interesting — just a face painted on over a colored background — but as I gazed at these men, the masks themselves seemed to sprout plants that covered the faces of the men and then subsumed them into the background of the jungle. 

I also thought of my friends a lot. I thought about how I could specifically be more present for them. My friend had recently insinuated that he considered himself to be a coward. That's such a deep-seated judgment of oneself — what could I possibly say or do to help him? I often feel like I don't know what to say or ask when my friends come to me with more complex issues like this, and I don't quite know why that is. I thought of a friend who was going through depression and I hadn't been there for as much as I should have. I thought of a friend who I hadn't thanked for all his help.

On the lighter end of the spectrum, I recalled that I really needed to thank my friends for things large and small. I thought of the psychological obstacles I'm facing and how important it is that I overcome them. 

The trips' effects came in waves and cycles. At various points, I would be dying of laughter with tears rolling down my eyes until I could hardly breathe. I thought of the conversation I had with the man at Sunset Bar who had told me that he thought I might be part-Mexican after I had told him that I was American. This had me dying when I recalled it. 

I recalled other times when I had been traveling or living in East and Southeast Asia where assumptions about my ethnicity were naïvely made by people. And a lot of those assumptions are based on really obvious stereotypes that would get you in trouble in more politically correct contexts. I mean, we're all guilty of this, but what I found interesting (and during the trip, absolutely hilarious) is that some people in this region of the world will hone in on one aspect of your appearance and derive a massive assumption from that. So, for instance, my friend once asked a Korean bar owner where he thought I was from and he said, "The Middle East." He said it was mostly because of my beard (which was always very trim while I was living in South Korea).

At other points during the trip, my body would be flooded with a feeling of warmth as tears welled up in my eyes. The tears seemed to be a natural physiological response to the mushrooms and not as a result of being overcome with emotion. I also remember imagining (not hallucinating) tribal men who wore masks that were alive with vegetation. The vegetation on their masks would grow and retract as if you were watching a plant do the same in a sped-up video. I remember feeling as though these tribal men were wanting to escort me somewhere. Or maybe they were guarding some place that they wanted to prevent me from entering...

The second night was much less intense and introspective than the first night. I don't remember having any of the same thoughts about my friends or seeing anything in my imagination as vivid as the tribal men from the first night, but it was an enjoyable experience nonetheless.

Not all of my time in Pai was as spellbinding as my first two days. What was probably the worst day I've had in recent memory ended up nearly overshadowing my entire stay there — at least in the immediate aftermath. I had rented a brand new Scoopi from a local motorbike rental shop. I decided to drive up in the mountains and take it as far as a national park. It was back through the same winding roads that the van had taken to from Chiang Mai to Pai. On my way back down the mountains it started to lightly sprinkle. I veered off into a rest area and waited for the rain to stop or at least let up a bit. Once that had happened, I decided to continue down the mountain.

I started taking one of the hairpin turns at what I thought was a very safe and manageable speed. However, in an instant, the bike went out from under me and I slid several meters into the front of a pickup truck whose driver had thankfully noticed me sliding his way. As I was coming to my senses and realizing what happened while the adrenaline was rushing coursing through me, the two Thai men checked to make sure I was ok and then assessed the damage to their truck. They then help me set my bike back up on its wheels. To my dismay, the handlebars of the brand-new Scoopi had been bent. It had somehow evaded any other noticeable scrapes or marks. Between the three of us, we unbent the handlebars enough to make the bike rideable. If I'm being honest, I also hoped that the business I would be returning it to wouldn't notice.

I offered to pay the two Thai men for the minor scrapes I had caused on their truck, but they politely refused. I said goodbye to them and I continued on down the mountain. I was feeling anxious about returning the bike, so I stopped on the side of the road and compared the current state of the handlebars to the pictures I had taken just when first renting the bike. It did not look good, but it didn't look especially bad either. I continued on down the mountain and stopped to get gas in town before returning my bike. As I opened the bike's seat to retrieve my wallet to pay for the gas, I noticed that my phone was not there. "That's strange," I thought. I checked my pockets and it wasn't in any of them. This is when I started to feel worried. Where could I have put it? I had taken pictures with it at the national park I had been to just an hour before.

"Oh my god," I thought. I must have left it on the back seat of my bike in my frazzled state when I stopped on the side of the road to assess the damage to the bike. Then it must have fallen off as I rode off. This was the only possible explanation I could think of. The only action I could think to take was to ride back up the mountain and look for it. As I rode up, I looked for any spacious patch of gravel off to the side that looked like the spot I had stopped. Nothing. Finally, I drove all the way up to the security check and tried communicating with the security guards there. Once I got my point across, they tried calling my phone. After a couple of rings, the one calling received a text message that said that the phone he was trying to reach no longer had the number he was dialing. This meant that, in the time that I had dropped my phone and arrived at the security guard post, someone had picked up my phone, unlocked it, and changed my phone number. At that point, there was nothing else I could do. One of the younger Thai security guards tried to help me access my phone through Gmail, but I couldn't do it without access to my Gmail account. I thanked him for his help, but I knew it was hopeless at that point.

As I went back down the mountain yet again, I realized that I wasn't freaking out to the same extent that I would be under other circumstances. Was it the shroom trips I had taken the past two nights that had helped keep me relatively calm in this situation? I can't say for certain, but I feel like there's a good chance that that was the case. 

I won't bore you with the rest. I ended up buying a cheap, new Android phone in Pai. I changed my passwords and updated the security settings on various online accounts. I returned the bike to an unhappy business owner, but he was calm throughout the entire ordeal as we rode to a local mechanic to get an estimate and eventually asked me to pay around $80 to pay for the damage. I thought that was fair and I didn't think he was overcharging me (too badly). 

I really got the best and the worst during my time in Pai. I know it's cliché to write this, but I would really like to return to Pai someday. I felt like my time there was tainted by my experiences with wrecking the bike and losing my phone, but that's the nature of reality for you. 

If anything, my time in Pai did invigorate my curiosity about psychedelics, which will ideally lead to greener and vibier pastures in the future...