826. The Road to Pai | Day 3: Ban Rak Thai Tea Village

This little village of Ban Rak Thai was another stop during our Mae Hong Son roadtrip. It's a Thai-Chinese village, populated with migrants from Yunnan province in China. The village is surrounded by tea plantations and offer tea tastings at their tea house. I'm not sure how busy this place gets during tourist season (non-covid times) but I imagine it's not very well known yet. It was quite of a drive in from the main road as well. I really liked it.

I think this is a resort. I would've liked to stay here but I'm not sure if they are currently open. So peaceful and tranquil..

It's up in the mountains so the temperatures were cool. There's usually mist over the lake which creates a nice atmosphere.

This is the tea house where we tasted a few different teas and bought some as souvenirs.

Probably the only shop open. I think it was a noodle restaurant.

Driving by one of the tea plantations

Here we stopped at a "fish cave". It was a park with a river full of fish running through, then at the very end there's a small cave with a lot of fish inside. You can buy buckets of food to feed them (containing fruits, leafy vegetables, dried coconut, kibble and dead cicadas).

At the "cave"

We also visited another bamboo bridge. As usual we were the only ones there. It's known as the longest bamboo bridge in Thailand and people go there to give alms to the monks. It would have been interesting to experience that and a beautiful site (I think at sunset they light up the sides of the bridge with fire). Now the place feels a bit run down. I imagine it hasn't been used in ages.

Some rice paddies near the end of the bridge

1864 curves along the Mae Hong Son loop! It was definitely a fun experience driving along there, and I'm so glad I didn't get carsick. Unfortunately we didn't actually do the full circle/loop though due to time constraints (looking back I guess we should've booked an extra day..I didn't realize the driving took so long). We went from Chiang Mai to Pai, then Pai to Mae Hong Son and turned back from there to take the same route back to Chiang Mai.

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518. Day 4 | Tea Village and Qiandao Lake

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I am here on this trip with my mom. We are meeting up with some family later in Shanghai then in Hong Kong (which will be our next stop!). Currently we are on day 3 of the Shanghai portion but now I realized we are not even in Shanghai anymore. We joined a tour for this and I always thought we'd spend the whole tour in Shanghai, but it turns out we are also driving a lot and visiting several cities a few hours away from there. Tomorrow we go to Huangshan which I'm soooo excited about!! I was most looking forward to it.

At the moment I'm not even sure which city we're in. Just looked on my GPS - I am currently in "Chun'an". I actually don't know many places in China besides the larger cities so all the other places we've been visiting so far..I've never even heard of until now. They've all been really interesting though and I'm having a really great time so far. I always knew China was huge but now I realize even in all the smaller random cities (that are not extremely touristic yet), there's so much to see and they're all so busy. For my next China trip I really want to see some pandas!! & I really want to go to Xi'an as well.

Today we visited a tea plantation and an island on Qiandao Lake (which I think is translated to something like the island of good luck). I may have made an impulsive purchase at the tea plantation. But it was the best green tea I've ever had and extremely fresh. I drink green tea a lot and I've never been able to find green tea of this quality in Toronto. The tea leaves are actually whole and smell really nice. & they are freshly picked. I got 1200RMB/~ $235 cdn worth which was 500g (plus they threw in a few free small tins for me). My mom got some as well. I'm pretty sure we have enough green tea now for at least a year or two..of drinking it everyday..lol.



This was one of the islands on Qiandao Lake. I really enjoyed it here. We took a ~20min boat ride over. Took a ton of photos along the way. On the island there were peacocks and also monkeys who put on a performance for us. We didn't explore all of it but I think there were also buddhist temples. The monkeys were my favourite part. I am not in support of using animals like that for entertainment though. I hope this is not one of the places where they get trained with abuse. They were so cute. I don't think I've ever seen monkeys before (except in a zoo)..I only just realized just how human-like they really are. The baby was adorable - it kept jumping around and playing with the ropes. I can't wait to visit the monkey island in Hong Kong too heheh



Today for lunch I accidentally swallowed a tiny fish bone. I kept drinking and swallowing mouthfuls of rice without chewing, trying to get it down but it wouldn't move. I imagined a worst case scenario where I may have had to get surgery to remove it or something lol. It was stuck in my throat all day until dinner when I was finally able to wash it down. So painful! It felt like a knife in my throat. Never going to eat fish again.

Time to sleep now. Got a whole 6 hours of sleep ahead of me! By the way I'm probably only going to post 5 photos per day on these daily updates. When I get back to Toronto and have more time, I'll edit the rest of the photos and post them up slowly with more in-depth posts.

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