White Water Rafting

Yesterday we got a transfer from Chiang Mai to Pai. They told us it would be 3 hours but ended up taking nearly 5 by the time the driver picked up everyone else in town at their hotels/guest houses and then got on the road. Pai is a hippy town up in the mountains of Northwest Thailand.

The purpose of coming to Pai was for the white water rafting. We spent a good part of last night walking between the rafting companies and discussing our options. We had planned to go on the two day and one night rafting trip but the monsoons haven't flooded the river to its peak capacity yet so we decided instead to take the one day trip.

The sign outside of the company showed that 16 people were already booked on the trip but when we went to pay, we discovered that those people were going on a trip from somewhere else and we were in fact the only people going on our trip. We got to pay the same price as usual but we got a whole boat and guide all to ourselves.

This morning we woke up early and were picked up by the rafting company at 7:30AM and taken to their compound for a breakfast of eggs and toast. We loaded into a pickup truck with a driver and our boat captain Boo. We were driven for an hour and a half up winding mountains and then onto forest roads past wild gibbons to the start of the trip.

We started on a smaller river, that was really peaceful, with no one around. There were kingfisher and hornbill birds flying in the trees. The hornbills are apparently quite rare, but we saw at least 10 of them.

The first river met with a second river and we stopped to have lunch at a forestry campground, the only sign of civilization we saw the entire day, while on the raft. We had a great lunch of a rice stirfry and some Thailand fruits. I made a short video of the fruits, which you can watch here:

After lunch, is when the real rapids started, (I don't have any pictures of the rapids, I was afraid I would throw my camera in the water by mistake) and it was a lot of fun, trying not to get thrown out of the boat. We also went for a swim in the river and Boo showed us how he likes to spin around in the water really fast, which we all tried and laughed a lot about.

After rafting for about 5 hours my arms were really sore and I said to Boo "My arms are killing me, how are yours doing?" Boo just laughed and replied "My arms are not sore". Boo was a really nice guy. He told us his entire life story and answered every question we could think of about life in Thailand. It was the first time we had an opportunity to spend one on one time with a Thai person who wasn't trying to sell us anything.

We finished rafting around 5pm and then drove the two hours back to Pai. It was a really great way to spend a day.

Look at all of the pictures from today in the slideshow below: