As usual there is never enough time to do everything, and it is with a bit of sadness that we load up the car and wave goodbye to our little oasis at the Pai My Guest Resort. Pai has really impressed us – probably more than we thought it would, and I can see us coming back here for a longer amount of time on a future visit. However, the road ahead beckons and we are headed farther west up into hills to see the rest of the Mae Hong Son loop.
The road winds through more mountains and valleys and while we thought the road to Pai was twisty, this section claims to have even more curves and bends than the last section – I guess I need to be fully alert for another day of driving!
The road passes through the village of Soppong and is the site of one of the more well known caves in Thailand. Tham Lod (Lod Cave) is a huge cave with a river that runs through it, and you can take a tour through the cave with a guide. You float through the cave on a bamboo raft, and then in a couple of spots you get off the raft to go into some of the larger caves within the main passage. The cave is featured in a lot of pictures of Thailand, and is one of the sights that I have wanted to see if we were ever up in this area.
As with any tour or day trip you don’t really know what you will get until you arrive and actually see it – what if the only highlights are the two things they pictured in the brochure? The cave however does not disappoint, and trip is well worth the stop on our journey!
The entrance to the cave is massive and you could easily fit a full sized house inside, and it is here that we board our raft for the journey inside. Our guide has a lantern and it is a good thing because we do not get too far in before we twist through a few corners and it is pitch black inside. The raft takes us a few hundred meters into the cave and then stops on a gravel beach where we leave the raft and wander into our first sub-cave.
There are at least 3 sub-caverns inside the main cave that have been explored that tourists can go into, and we spend about half an hour going through the first two sub-caves before getting back on our raft to go farther into the main cave to see the last sub-cave. We are about a kilometer into the cave when we can see the opening at the other end, and we have floated right through the mountain. We explore the last cavern here and then exit the cave for a hike back to the park entrance.
The cave has been a great experience and I am glad we took the time to stop. We had originally planned to stop overnight here in Soppong, but the day is still early, and if we press on to Mae Hong Son then we will have made up for the extra day we decided to stay in Pai, so after a quick bite to eat in the village it is off to Mae Hong Son.
The city of Mae Hong Son is tucked up in the north-western corner of Thailand and aside from the small hill tribe villages everywhere it is the last bit of civilization before going into Burma. On the west edge of the city there is a large hill with a temple on top, and we take a drive up to look out over the city and the valley farther to the west.
Unfortunately we don’t have enough time to explore any of the surrounding area and will have to do that another time, but I can easily see us coming back in the future for a longer stay and a more thorough exploration.