Thailand 2025. Day 11. Caves and landslides on the way to Pai

First of all we had to visit the Chiang Dao Cave, which is one of the main local attractions. The cave opens at the base of an enormous tower of limestone, a good 500 m tall and is likely very long and anastomosing, although the visitor can only see two of the branches 500 and 750 m long. The first one is the illuminated path, which has been used to construct a good dozen shrines to Buddha and other related icons. The mythical animals represented in these shrines include a particularly fearsome 5 to 9 headed dragon. For the other path you need a guide, which in our case was a sweet middle-age lady carrying  a hurricane lantern, who did her best to show us fancy forms in the stalactites and stalagmites of the cave, and the rookeries of bats found in some of the deeper galleries. We also saw a couple of really creepy spiders, almost the size of a hand.

Once we hit the road we found that the rain was a lot less annoying than it had been yesterday. Or maybe we are getting used to riding in our ponchos. In any case the respite was welcome because we had some high mountains to cross and it is a lot easier to navigate them when you can see where you are going. The road followed a valley cut into thick terrace deposits, which are not very stable, so we saw a lot of landslides. As we went past by them I couldn't help but thinking that this is a place where engineering geologists and landslide mitigation crews have their work cut out for them every day of the week. There were places where half of the road had been taking away by the collapse of the ground into a deep ravine, which is going to require a major bridging effort to keep the road to be cut out completely. In one case an upstream failure had completely blocked a creek, which had then spilled over the tarmac spilling mud and water as a torrent that we had to cut across.

We stopped and stretched our legs by walking to a waterfall tumbling over a tilted sequence of sandstones and shales. It was very pretty but the water was very muddy.

We found hard cold rain as we crossed over the misty mountains before coming down into the valley of Pai, a particularly idyllic spot that has found great favor with foreign visitors of the lotus-eating kind. It is almost a throw back to hippie years but with a younger generation. Marijuana is legal here in Thailand, but there are many signs that say drugs are illegal and their use carries heavy fines. 

We had a browsing dinner at the food market, greatly facilitated by the lady who fixed us salads and provided us with plates and sporks to eat them. I added to it a grilled catfish I bought at another stall (very delicious) and a nutella and banana crepe.