From Elephants to Elephant Pants: Pai, Thailand

After a few months of being on the road now, we’ve started to experience a funny feeling that we had not felt during previous travels. It happens at uneventful moments, such as eating breakfast or reading a book. It is usually brief, but pronounced— we look up, and completely forget where we are! Unable to immediately distinguish from the look of our surroundings, we have to think through the progression of our trip for a second to figure out the answer.

Usually the stimulation of traveling in a foreign place keeps us ever present, especially in Asia, where there is sensory overload from the volume of people, the pungent smells, the jarring noises, and the different lifestyle in general. Given these constant reminders, it’s typically hard to forget where we are. But as the days flow into weeks and weeks into months, we have become far less anxious about these sensations, as well as the challenges faced when we do not know the language, do not understand the customs, and do not know where to go. The differences in cultures and the changes themselves have become the familiar. Wherever we wake up, we feel at home, even though we’re sleeping in a different bed or mat or sleeper bus almost every night.

Home was also a little what Pai felt like. But not for the right reasons.

We were actually pretty excited to get to Pai despite the extremely curvy, nausea-inducing road to get there (at the Pai-bound window counters at Chiang Mai’s bus station, they sell Dramamine-type pills; a local woman behind us apparently failed to buy them, and she—as well as the rest of us who sat around her—suffered for it!). When we visited Chiang Mai ten years ago, we had heard great things about this small town three hours north, set in the beautiful lush hills of northern Thailand, but we did not have enough time to go back then, so we have kept it on our list ever since. It had a reputation of being a haven for backpackers, supposedly with an aura of being off the beaten path. Our past selves couldn’t have been more wrong. Or, maybe our past selves were right for who we were back then, but our current selves were sorely disappointed.

This is unfortunate, because Pai is a picturesque Thai village of about two thousand people. It is beautiful in a bucolic, quaint sort of way. It does not have the dramatic landscapes of many other destinations in Southeast Asia; rather, it features a steady stream of rolling hills that blend into one another to create an ocean of green waves. Nestled into these hills, along a river, is the barely-three-block-wide town of Pai, with temples dotted along its periphery, overlooking the town. The rural community on Pai’s outskirts has a distinctly local feel, filled with rice paddies and farmland, representative of the northern Thailand countryside.

But there’s just one little problem: everyone in Pai itself is a tourist. And a specific kind of tourist—the new-age twenty-something backpacker. Many backpackers come to Pai not to experience rural Thai life, but to party and hang out with other travelers. Because of this, Pai is a truly confounding place—in the midst of this tranquil agricultural valley is a Las Vegas pool party. Seemingly every store on those three small blocks caters to western tourists, from the expensive organic juice bars, to the tattoo parlors using only eco-friendly bamboo tattooing tools, to the massage parlors that operate like machines, pumping out services for their western customers, who come in droves like flies buzzing around a Krispy Kreme donut manufacturing line. There is also a string of open-air dance clubs blaring western music and flashing strobe lights, with club proprietors out front waving flyers offering free Long Island Iced Teas.

All of this could perhaps be fine on its own (except for the Long Island Iced Teas), but the misalignment with where Pai is located made for a disconnect too jarring and unwelcome for us. It is as if somehow Bourbon Street was located in a small town in the remote green mountains of Vermont.

But the last straw for us was the infamous elephant pants. Elephant pants are those really loose-fitting pants featuring “Thai designs” and elephants that you see all over Southeast Asia. Lines of stores and street markets sell all manner and style of elephant pants (and scarves and shirts and shorts and skirts now, apparently), and tourists just eat them up. Elephant pants are more than just a comfy article of clothing, though; it is a lifestyle. Donning elephant pants represents one who is a “nonconformist” who likes to travel “off the beaten path;” they are anti-fashion, and god damnit, they are relaxed. So of course, everyone is wearing them. For fear of over-generalizing, we are about to over-generalize: the Pai elephant pants wearer is usually a bro, maybe with dreads, who pairs his new elephant pants with a muscle tank to show off his new tattoo, and talks about how healthy he is as a vegetarian while chugging a large Chang beer. We can’t believe how many people sport these elephant pants wherever we go—so much so that it has become an enduring joke between us. But it was truly unanimous in Pai. (A real conversation we overheard in Pai from a few Americans in elephant pants: “Dude, I’m really enjoying the local food—I had some Pad Thai earlier that was so good!” Another real conversation our friends overhead in Pai: “Can anything actually be vegan if we all come from the dinosaurs?” Oh, Pai.)

OK, now we’re getting cynical. Look, we can completely empathize with the appeal of connecting with fellow travelers from around the world and taking it easy for awhile (though we will never forgive you if you only eat Pad Thai in Thailand!). But Pai just felt too much like an American college frat party and too little like a Thai farming village. Given how local the rest of the region is, it just feels wrong for western travelers to take over this small town and turn it into a party scene. Pai is billed as this haven “away from it all,” but it is really just a playground to take many young backpackers back to the western world where they came from. This isn’t the same as forgetting where you are because you are settling into the discomfort of traveling in a foreign land; this is forgetting where you are because you have actually escaped from that discomfort entirely.

Still, we tried to appreciate the Pai scene in a thirties sort of way. We enjoyed some of the western culinary options, including delicious chicken and waffles with avocado, a Belgian waffle with fresh fruit and Nutella, and, yes, even some savory vegan quiches made using coconut flour (from the dinosaurs). We had some of the best Khao Soi in the country, and more delicious meats on sticks at the night market. It was nice to sit outside under the warm night sky and have a drink while listening to a Spanish-Argentinian couple play live music (singing a Bruno Mars song, of course). And then we went to bed early.

Or at least, we tried to go to bed early. We stayed at a place called “The Hideaway” guesthouse, which we deliberately chose because we had read in reviews that it was quiet. However, despite its name, it was not hidden at all. In fact, it was right on the main strip, and our room was directly above a super loud bar. Change your freakin’ name, Hideaway! Not being able to sleep while listening to the chants of, “Aussie Aussie Aussie, oie oie oie!” from raucous crowds below us was the icing on the cake for our feelings about the authenticity of Pai.

We groggily awoke the next day to explore the sleepy valley. After walking along a historical bridge that was originally built by the Japanese during World War II, we explored Pai Canyon, which is an extremely small version of Bryce Canyon. We also swam at Pembok Falls’ nice swimming hole and waterfall, visited a Chinese village on the hill with a sweeping view of the villages and rice fields, and watched the sun set from a giant Buddha overlooking the valley—along with seemingly everyone else, decked out in their elephants pants. Though it was all beautiful and fun, something always felt amiss. Having planned for four or five days in Pai, we packed up and left after only 36 hours.

Ready to move on from all the western comforts of Pai, we headed another few hours north to Mae Hong Son province close to the Myanmar border—this time to a place that could not have been more different from Pai.

Karen & Michael

Pai, Thailand, November 20-21, 2019