Pai

Pai is an old Shan settlement rather than a Thai one. The valley lies on the route between the Ping basin and the Salween country, and Tai Yai families farming rice along the river had a small walled town here under the principality of Mae Hong Son, which in turn owed allegiance to Chiang Mai and then Bangkok. Karen, Lisu and Lahu communities settled the surrounding hills, and Yunnanese Chinese families arrived in the 20th century, founding Santichon and other villages.

The Second World War brought the outside world briefly to the valley. Japanese forces moving towards Burma drove road-building through the valley, work abandoned in 1944; the iron bridge south-east of the town, known as the World War II Memorial Bridge, was in fact put up after the war. Otherwise the valley stayed remote: the mountain road from Chiang Mai was not paved for much of the 20th century, and the journey took a day or more.

Pai's modern history begins with that road. Improvements from the late 1960s onwards, and the appearance of guesthouses in the 1980s and 1990s, turned the town into a stop on the northern backpacker circuit; Thai visitors followed in large numbers from the 2000s. Resorts, cafés and bars spread along the valley floor, and tourism replaced farming as the main source of income. Growth has come with costs — land prices, waste, water use and pressure on a small municipality — which residents and the provincial authorities have debated for years.

The valley's culture is Shan first. Wats here are built in the Tai Yai manner, with tiered wooden roofs and slender spires rather than the high gables of central Thailand, and Shan is still spoken at home by older residents. The Shan festival year includes Poy Sang Long, when boys are dressed as princes, painted and carried on adults' shoulders through the town before entering the monkhood, and temple fairs that mix Burmese and northern Thai custom.

Around the town are Lisu, Lahu and Karen villages with their own languages, dress and beliefs, and the Yunnanese Chinese settlement at Santichon, founded by families who left China in the mid-20th century and kept their food, tea and architecture. Markets are where these communities meet, and hill produce — tea, coffee, vegetables, dried chillies — passes through them.

Over this sits the traveller culture that made Pai famous: guitar music in bamboo bars, yoga and meditation courses, art and craft stalls on the walking street and a long-staying foreign population. The two worlds coexist with some friction. Residents ask visitors to dress modestly away from the river, keep noise down in residential lanes and treat temples as working religious buildings; local authorities have periodically tightened rules on bar hours and on building in the valley.

Only a few thousand people live in the town itself, and the rest of the district in farming villages along the river and in the hills. Rice, garlic, soya beans and vegetables are still grown on the valley floor, and coffee and tea on the slopes, but tourism now provides most cash income: guesthouses, restaurants, scooter hire, tour agencies and construction.

The daily rhythm is simple and strongly seasonal. The fresh market opens before dawn, monks walk the alms round through the lanes, farm work is done in the cool of the morning, and the town sleeps through the afternoon heat before the walking street opens in the early evening. In the high season from November to February the population multiplies and every guesthouse is full; in the rains the valley empties, some businesses close, and life returns to agriculture.

The issues residents discuss are those of a small place under pressure: water supply in the dry season, rubbish and sewage, land bought by outside investors, the smoke that fills the valley from February to April, and flooding along the Pai River, which with a mudslide did heavy damage to the town in 2005. Health care and secondary schooling mean travelling to Chiang Mai or Mae Hong Son.

Pai eats northern Thai food with a strong Shan accent. Khao soi, egg noodles in coconut curry broth, and khanom jeen nam ngiao, rice noodles in a pork and tomato broth, are everyday dishes, and sticky rice comes with the chilli pastes nam phrik num and nam phrik ong and with crisp pork rind. Shan cooking contributes thua nao, fermented soybean dried into discs and used as a seasoning, and mild curries of pork and pickled vegetables.

The Yunnanese village nearby serves a different register: black chicken soup with herbs, braised pork leg with steamed mantou buns, and Chinese pickles, with oolong tea grown on the hills around. Coffee is a valley product too, roasted in the town and served in dozens of small cafés, and the walking street adds pancakes, rotis, grilled skewers, fresh spring rolls and Thai sweets to the mix — a traveller-oriented street-food scene unusually broad for a town of this size.

Vegetarian and vegan cooking is easy to find here, a legacy of the yoga and long-stay communities, and the market supplies the valley's own produce: garlic, chillies, greens, bananas and, in the cool season, strawberries and temperate vegetables from the royal project farms in the mountains. Rice whisky and local fruit wines are sold in village shops.