I often stop back with my parents when I return home between trips. After finishing my time in Latin America, I did a short stint back in England, working a job that felt insanely boring. A friend from an Ayahuasca retreat in Ecuador had just set up a guesthouse in northern Thailand and was encouraging me to visit for a two-week "reset". I mentioned the trip in my job interview, and knowing my travelling past, they jokingly asked: "Are you going to come back?" I didn't plan to stay in Asia, but my intuition told me to book the ticket one-way and figure out the return once I got there.
Chiang Dao
On some fundamental level I knew Asia was going to become my home for the foreseeable future.
I flew into Bangkok for a night to meet my friend, then on to Chiang Dao in northern Thailand. His place was special: a converted traditional Thai house in a quiet village, facing "Lady Face Mountain", a mountain that, from exactly that spot, resembled the outline of a woman's face. Move a little left or right and the illusion vanished.
My first night in Chiang Dao was a borderline psychedelic experience in itself. Completely sober, I felt a surge of cosmic energy running through me, keeping me awake, alert and euphoric all night. On some fundamental level I knew Asia was going to become my home for the foreseeable future, though quitting my job felt daunting, since I'd always treated my employers with respect.
Not far from the guesthouse was Pai, recommended to me by my tattoo artist and pretty much every other guest there, so with over a week of my holiday left, I went.
The monastery
Pai didn't impress me at first. It seemed like a fairly small town, and arriving at night I couldn't see much of the nature around it. At the hostel that evening, someone repeated a recommendation I'd already heard in Chiang Dao: visit Wat Pa Tam Wua, a Buddhist forest monastery on the outskirts. Spending time in a monastery had long been a fantasy of mine, so I went.
Wat Pa Tam Wua sits in a high valley with beautiful grounds. We meditated around four hours a day, with the option to go totally silent. The weather was gorgeous throughout the dry season, and the bliss that builds through extended clean living and meditation was delicious. I was loving it more than anything else I'd experienced travelling so far, and I dreaded the prospect of leaving. But the time was approaching when I'd need to get back to work in the UK on Monday.
I was loving my life here, and that job was soul-destroying. A guy I'd met in Mexico, who I greatly respected and who had a fascination with the occult, once told me: "You best believe the way you live your life will determine what happens when you die." His words sat in the back of my mind as I weighed what mattered more: continuing my quest for enlightenment in Asia, or appeasing my new bosses back in the UK. The answer had been clear all along, in my refusal to buy a return ticket in the first place.
Quitting, again
Sunday night, northern Thailand. Back at work in England Monday. I sent my boss the email that committed me to my own self-actualisation, and rejected what made me miserable. He never replied; I only heard from HR a few days later.
Shambhala
It moved me to my core. He truly evoked the spirits with his melodies.
The same guy who'd recommended the monastery also told me about a festival coming up, in Chiang Dao of all places: Shambhala, "the land of the enlightened", a ten-day festival in a field with music and all things bohemian. Now free of my job, I had total freedom to go.
I don't know what I was expecting, but Shambhala completely revolutionised how I saw music. I wasn't really feeling it for the first few days, my mind was elsewhere after some drama at the guesthouse just before it started. Halfway through, I smoked a bit of weed to shift my experience. I don't much like weed, and it spun me out, so I went to the big tree, the spiritual heart of the festival, to ground myself. My head was still spinning when, out of nowhere, an old Japanese man walked past, down to the river nearby, and started playing a wooden flute within earshot. It moved me to my core. He truly evoked the spirits with his melodies. What happened next was a quantum shift in how I'd come to see music as a tool of spiritual transmission.
Boogie
The rest of the festival I walked around blissfully with my friend's acoustic guitar, sitting in on countless jam sessions that were better, more intimate and more spontaneous than anything on the main stage. Then, on the last night, I met a super cool girl who went by the name Boogie. She had awesome tattoos and dreadlocks. It was the eve of her birthday, and we went to the big tree to celebrate. I pulled out my guitar and started jamming with a guy on drums who was already there. Before long there was a whole crowd around us, celebrating the last night and playing a boogie for Boogie.
She and I made a connection, and she encouraged me to join her in Pai after the festival ended, where people often get stuck in what's called the "Pai hole": a state where a planned couple of days turns into weeks or months. Still riding my newly found freedom in Thailand, I obliged and off I went. On the recommendation of another friend I'd met at the festival, I stayed at a well-known hippy hostel there, and so began my love of Pai.
The mushroom ceremony
In her eyes I could see god.
Perhaps to thank me for making her birthday special, Boogie invited me to spend some time with her out in nature and partake in her sacrament: mushrooms. She offered mushroom healing to those close to her, was a master meditator, and had an incredible ethereal energy about her. We went to a little river on the outskirts of town and took a strong strain of mushies (APEs, for those who know). She sat directly in front of me and spoke to the great spirit within me, and in her eyes I could see god: I could see that we were eternal souls, and the energetic basis of all reality was suddenly so obvious to me. I got back to my hostel that night telling my friends I'd seen god, and I think they believed me.
After four weeks in Pai my time was up, and I left for Nepal to trek. I knew my departure was only for the moment, and I was sure I'd return, which I did the following year.
Back in the Pai hole
Something about it all felt so unifying.
The next Asia trip started much the same way: Chiang Dao first, at my friend's guesthouse, then off to Pai once I'd worked up a hunger for something more stimulating. This time the flavour of the experience was quite different, in a good way.
I arrived just before New Year's Eve without a plan. Lying in a hammock at the same hostel as the year before, some voice in my head told me to go to the water fountain. I did, and bumped into a guy I'd met at the visa extension office the day before. I asked casually what he had planned for NYE, and he told me about a massive party at a venue owned by some crypto millionaire. It was my first rave whilst travelling and it turned out to be a blast. Till then my association with Pai was the more artistic, spiritual, acoustic music vibe that is typical of those bohemian communities. Now all those same beautiful spirits were having a blast in this epic venue with artificial waterfalls and a bonfire in the centre of the dance floor.
That rave set the tone for the rest of my stint in Pai; by fortunate coincidence, there'd be a new one almost every week. One evening I was wandering around a popular bar in Pai where they do fire shows and bumped into an old American friend I'd met in a hostel in London two and a half years earlier and hadn't seen since. We could barely believe it. Turned out she was stuck in the Pai hole too, and frequented the same hostel as me. There she'd befriended a couple of Australian lads who were organising a series of parties on land belonging to a guy in the northern Thai mafia, apparently, not verified, but it makes for a cool story if it's true. We went on to help set up the parties, lending a hand here and there.
The parties were incredible. The sound system was also pretty solid for an illegal rave in a field: a monster of a thing, four subs along the floor and around seven regular speakers stacked on top, if I recall. It was so nice to see all the people of Pai celebrating together, at an event created by fellow lovers of the place. This might sound like a bizarre comparison, but when I visited Los Angeles a few years earlier there was this strange sense of it feeling like the centre of the cultural world, Hollywood and all that. Pai in those moments felt like some great parallel to it: the hidden Mecca of all the wayward bohemians. Something about it all felt so unifying.
Final thoughts
There was once a time when Western Europe had similarly authentic practices, in paganism and the druids.
Places like Pai offer a home for mostly Western spiritual seekers looking for a community where they can live the bohemian lives that may seem out of place in their home countries. Part of the reason these people feel the need to head as far as Asia or South America to find such places is the spiritual traditions native to them, which naturally resonate with those kinds of minds (Buddhism and Hinduism, and indigenous shamanism, respectively). There was once a time when Western Europe had similarly authentic practices, in paganism and the druids and so on, but they were cleared out by the organised religions that emerged and denounced them. The result is a feeling that, as a Westerner, finding genuine spirituality means travelling far from your own community to find it.
This is a double-edged sword. For the bohemians, living in these communities is a no-brainer: they're directly integrated into a culture with spiritual traditions close to what they already believe, and on top of that, these countries are often highly affordable to live in thanks to their weaker currencies relative to the pound, dollar and euro.
The downside is that, as with gentrification everywhere, locals get pushed out, and often grow resentful. Take Koh Phangan in Thailand and Bali in Indonesia: both originally local places, with occasional travellers having genuine discovery experiences there. Now both are almost overrun with foreign-owned businesses and swarms of travellers, many of whom settle there permanently.
I had fully planned to move to Pai on the Thai "digital nomad" visa at some point during my recently ended second Asia trip. It's a place I love, and I feel at home there. But since returning home to work on this website and spend time with family, I've had enough distance to see that maybe I don't need to live that life forever. As fun as it is, travelling from place to place and living the hippy life can only do so much for what I'd call vertical progress in your life, building real depth in one place rather than breadth across many. If you want to grow something authentic of your own, you need to lock in, and more often than not be in one place.
Reflecting on that, and on the way locals are getting pushed out by relatively wealthy travellers exactly like me, has let me come to peace with staying in the UK longer than I'd originally planned, and not rushing back to live in Asia, though I love it.