We just arrived in Bangkok this morning, and I’m not going to lie, I’m feeling really overwhelmed and a little sad. Our overnight bus dropped us off at 5am this morning on a random street in the pitch dark, and we took a taxi to our hostel, only to wait for six hours until check-in. I fell into a sort of half-sleep on a wooden bench outside of reception, hugging my backpack to me so I wouldn’t get robbed, and felt very, very homeless. Not only am I sleep-deprived, with an upset stomach and a very strange rash breaking out on my arm, but I’m also slightly depressed because I absolutely fell in love with Pai – the tiny, hippie town where Kelsey and I spent the last few days – and that’s the only place I want to be right now.

Last weekend, Kelsey and I took a mini bus through the winding roads up north of Chiang Mai to Pai – a tiny town in the mountains, filled with cute little tea shops, prayer flags, tie dye, and young travelers. It was so easy to meet people there because everyone was doing the same thing – taking a break from their busy travel lives to do absolutely nothing in Pai. It’s the type of place you find and immediately begin to unwind and relax and settle in. It felt like home. There was nothing not to love.

Welcome to Pai

A few minutes after getting off the bus and checking into our hostel, Common Grounds, we were walking down the street and heard a girl on a motorbike yell, “KELSEY!!!” It was a girl she went to university with who’s been living at the Circus School in Pai for the past two months. Talk about a small world. She pointed us in the direction of the Sunset Bar that night for a fire show she’d be performing at.

So that’s how we found Sunset Bar. We rolled up on our first night to the hidden little tiki bar that you could only get to by crossing a sketchy bamboo bridge since it was on the other side of the river. When we got there, it was empty. No fire show. The only person there was an older guy sitting at the bar, and on second glance, we realized he’d been at our hostel in Chiang Mai, so we stopped to say hello. And then we just got sucked into Sunset Bar. We had a couple beers with our Chiang Mai friend, Mike from South Africa who’s now living in Reno, Nevada, and on a six-month trip at a sort of transition phase in his life. He introduced us to the bartender, Sanpet, half Thai-half Canadian, covered in tattoos with gauged earrings, the sweetest, kindest, wisest twenty-five-year-old I’ve ever met. Our new best friend. We chilled with Mike and Sanpet for hours and decided this was our new favorite spot.

We settled in to the Pai lifestyle, doing nothing. Our first couple days looked something like this: Kelsey and I lying in hammocks, sipping coffees, chatting with our new hostel friends from Denmark/Canada/Ireland/Germany/England, with dogs at our feet who were all named after Thai curries, taking breaks to walk five minutes down the street to all the food stands that strangely sold burritos, ice cream, pizza, and burgers instead of traditional Thai food. On our third day we were antsy for an adventure, so Kelsey and I rented a motorbike for the day. We paid 100 baht (about $3) for the day, and set off on the winding roads through Pai. We had a map, but no destination, which was absolutely fine because everywhere was beautiful. We got caught in the rain and searched for hours for some hot springs to swim in, only to find that the ones we stumbled upon were literally boiling (I burned my toes), and we nearly ran out of petrol on the long drive back to town, but it was still one of the best days of our trip so far. Green mountains, rice fields, waterfalls, wind in our hair.

Moped selfies

That night as we sat at a burger joint – Burger Queen – inhaling some of the best burgers we’ve ever had, we had this overwhelming feeling again of how small the world is. Pai seemed like a university campus that night, because every other group of people that passed us had familiar faces. We ran into at least fifteen people who had all been at our hostel in Chiang Mai – everyone traveling separately but ending up in the same place. We made plans for everyone to meet at Sunset Bar, and because Kelsey and I spread the word and brought so many new friends, Sanpet hooked us up with free drinks all night. We befriended a couple of the other bartenders, two Aussie guys from Byron Bay, who made me really homesick for Australia. We stayed at Sunset until 4am that night, well after closing time, just hanging out with Sanpet, the Aussies, and their Thai tattoo artist Jeanne, who promised to design a tattoo for me the next day. So that’s what I did on our last day in Pai – I got a tattoo (sorry, Dad). I’d been wanting one for ages, and what a great souvenir/story to tell! Jeanne designed a compass with my first initial in the middle – to center me, to make sure I am never lost, and to guide me all over the world.

Inked

After spending the day at the Magic Monkey tattoo parlor, Kelsey and I met up with some of our Chiang Mai friends to go watch the sunset at the Pai Canyon. I hopped onto the back of a motorbike with Martin, a cute guy from Chile I just met who just finished a semester in New Zealand, and we loaded our other friends onto the backs of a few other bikes, stayed until the sun went down, and then rode back to spend our last night at Sunset Bar with our “travel family.”

It’s going to be such a strange feeling to go home and not be surrounded by travelers. In the past thirteen months, I’ve found that I could walk up to just about anyone and have a day-long conversation with them by asking the same three questions: where are you from, where have you been, and where are you going? Even when I was living in Brisbane, working, I was meeting people from all over the world. Once I stepped outside of the bubble that is America, I found that travel is such an important part of life in so many other cultures. Now, spending nearly three months in a constant wandering state, I can’t imagine what it will be like to go back to a place where people have jobs and addresses and phone numbers. It’s going to be such a culture shock. I don’t know how I’ll possibly find anything to talk to anyone about.

Our last night in Pai was almost surreal. Here we were, surrounded by a group of nearly twenty people who we’d only just met, but we honestly did feel like a family. We took over the entire Sunset Bar, trading tales about where we were from, where we have been, where we are going, and feeling so close because we’ll all always share this particular overlap in our stories. I was nearly in tears at the end of the night, giving hugs to my travel family, to Sanpet and Jeanne and the other bartenders who I don’t think I’ll ever forget because they made this week the most awesome. I love you all, and I really don’t think it’s goodbye forever!

Travel family at Sunset Bar