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The Three Best Hostels in Pai, Thailand

Pai is an awesome village to visit in Thailand. The scenery is great, it’s cheap, there’s plenty to do, and the area is beautiful. You can rent a scooter for a couple of dollars a day, or splurge and get a dirt bike for $15. There are dozens of restaurants to eat at, and the night market is something special. If you’re planning on making the trip to Pai you’ll want to find a great hostel, and that’s what we’ll look at in this article. These Pai hostels are all popular and they’re a great deal too.

1. Darling Hostel

A picture of Darling Hostel in Pai ThailandSituated on the outskirts of town, it takes about 10 minutes to reach Darling from the main street in Pai. Most people who stay here choose to rent scooters and the parking lot is often jammed with them. Darling offers a couple of nice features that make it a fun place to stay. Foremost it has an excellent view out over the whole town of Pai, and you can watch the sunset over the mountains. In the morning you can order breakfast, and it’s one of the few hostels in Thailand with decent coffee. There’s a pool that’s ice cold, plenty of deck chairs to relax on, and a communal fireplace that often gets lit at night.

The best accommodations at Darling hostel are the two and three bedroom private rooms. The dorms are reputed to be less comfortable. The WiFi works OK in the common area, but don’t expect to get any kind of decent coverage in your room. Darling is really the best fit if you want to stay somewhere quiet, and you’re travelling with someone and can split a private room. It’s a beautiful hostel and the atmosphere is excellent.

2. Circus Hostel

Pai Circus HostelCircus hostel is one of the most unique hostels in Pai, and in all of Thailand for that matter. The hostel is situated on a large hilltop and everything takes place outside. There’s a small pool, plenty of space to lay out a mat and tan, or do anything else for that matter. Next to the pool is an outdoor bar which opens around four and closes at midnight. By the bar is a popular pool table and a set of couches and chairs to hang out on. A short walk away is an outdoor eating area where you can bring food in to eat, or buy your own from the hostel. There are communal bathrooms and fire shows at night.

Living at Circus hostel is akin to high level camping. Half of the bathrooms don’t have hot water, and the rest are a decent walk away from the bungalows. Also, it has the worst WiFi in all of Southeast Asia. Even getting a connection to check your email is often impossible. That being said, it’s a fun hostel to stay at. Something is always happening, it’s very social, and there’s always someone to meet. Also, the private bungalows cost less than $10 a night, which makes this an ideal choice for anyone on a budget.

3. Purple Monkey

Purple MonkeyThe first two hostels Pai that I mentioned I’ve stayed at and can vouch for. The Purple Monkey I’ve never stayed at but I have heard good things about it from several other travelers. While Darling and Circus are both ideally suited for people travelling in groups, the Purple Monkey is a better fit if you plan on staying in a dorm. The beds are cheap and comfortable, and there’s a large communal space to meet people. With an outdoor bar and pool table you won’t be bored at night. There’s also a pool, but in the tradition of almost every hostel in Pai, it’s very small.

If you have the time you may want to consider staying at several different hostels. Each has its own unique flair and has plenty offer in the way of entertainment. Pai is a lovely place to stay, and with the difficulty of getting there it doesn’t really make sense to stay a few days and leave. And for anyone else that’s been to Pai and knows of other good hostels, leave a comment to let everyone else know about them!

Dinner With Friends in Pai

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To reach Pai from Bangkok you have to take a thirteen hour train ride through the oscillating countryside of Thailand. You disembark in Chiang Mai, take a taxi to the bus station, and then take a four hour bus ride up through the mountains.A bus ride to Pai Thailand If you’re lucky your driver won’t be a homicidal maniac. However, most people are unlucky, and they spend most of their ride clutching the seat in front of them, as the bus barrels through hair pins turns at 40 miles an hour.

Despite the hardships, the journey is worth it. Pai is a small town tucked up in the mountains of north Thailand. It’s easy to imagine it twenty years ago as an underdeveloped village with cows and people riding bicycles. Tourism has changed that. The main road that runs through the center of Pai is a quagmire of inexperienced tourists driving scooters, and people selling fruit smoothies along the side of the road.

In our five months of travelling together, this small village held me and Joanna’s attention longer than anywhere else. We had planned to spend a week there, and wee ended up staying for three times as long. In one sense, it’s funny that we would choose to spend so long in a small mountain village, while actively hating the bustling Bangkok. The pieces fall together once you know Pai, and it’s easy to understand how you can become trapped.

Switching Hostels

Darling Hostel in Pai ThailandWe started our journey in Pai three strong. Me, Joanna, and her friend Asger from Denmark. For a week we stayed at Darling Hostel, where we had an incredible balcony that gave us a beautiful view of the entire town. Every night the expansive deck became a bar, and after five days we had filled a thirty gallon wicker basket with empty bottles of Chang.

Apart from drinking a liver busting amount of beer, the most fun we had was our two days playing with the bikes. In Thailand it’s easy to rent a dirt bike or motorcycle. This was especially true in Pai, as multiple shops had shiny new bikes sitting in front. Asger had driven a bike twice in his life before, and he was confident he could do it again. So I rented my first crotch rocket, albeit a small one, and Asger opted for the dirt bike. We drove them for hours through the mountains surrounding Pai. A better time was never had.

Asger riding a dirt bike in Pai ThailandUnfortunately, unlike me and Joanna, Asger had limited vacation time. After just five short days he flew back to Denmark, leaving me and Joanna to continue the adventure in the tiny town. While staying at Darling, we had been hearing music waft over from another hostel about a quarter mile away. One day a particularly loud drum caught Joanna’s attention and she went to check it out. She came back two hours later.

“Guess what?” She said to me with a grin.

“What’s up?”

“I booked us a room at Circus.”

“Damn, so it’s cool huh. When are we going over there?”

“Tomorrow. Do you remember Eddy from Koh Rong? He’s over there right now. We can go over later and jam with them. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it’s really freaking cool!”

So it went. That afternoon we went over to Circus and we met Eddy, who we had seen for the first time in Koh Rong, 1,400 km away. Even though the odds of this happening seem low, it’s simply not so. There are only so many popular tourist destinations in Asia, and when you potentially meet dozens of people at every hostel, you’re bound to run into some of them again.

Living at the Circus

At Circus, the bungalows are made out of bamboo with no insulation. High up in the mountains, we nearly froze to death our first night. Three blankets did little to dissuade the frigid air. I remember being close to Joanna under the blankets, hugging her like I would drift out into space if I let go. Poor sleep became a theme at Circus. Loud music, an uncomfortable bed, too little beer. None of it helped. None of it mattered. Circus was a great experiment in happiness.

In our five months of travel we had few lasting rituals, as we changed cities to quickly to allow for them. However, at Circus, we developed the great habit of a nightly dinner. Circus is located fifteen minutes outside of Pai and we rented a scooter to get around. $2.50 a day gets you a ride that turns on and violently protests if you try to go over 20 mph.

Sunset at Pai ThailandEvery night around sunset I would take our wheezing scooter into town for dinner. As the sun disappeared behind the mountains, food stalls began to populate the streets. Pad Thai, meat on a stick, sushi, and various other dishes were available. With just $5 it was possible to get a belly busting amount of food, and my favorite part of the night was picking it out. Parking the scooter, I would walk up and down the street, passing dozens of stalls, filling my bag with food. Once it reached breaking point I would coax the scooter to life, ease it through the crowd of people, and zoom back up to Circus.

Spreading a towel on our bed, me and Joanna would dig into the food. She preferred sushi, and my main dish was usually something Asian with a list of unidentifiable ingredients. After the main course, we would both finish dinner with meat on a stick. If you’ve ever been to Southeast Asia, or presumably other places, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Business card sized pieces of meat, skewered on a piece of bamboo, doused in sauce and grilled to perfection.

I enjoyed our nightly ritual and I believe Joanna did as well. Every night dinner was different, and it was always exciting to unpack the bag and see the pile of food laid out. Inevitably after dinner we would go out for a beer and a game of pool. The days and nights passed quickly, and before we knew it we had been at Circus for two weeks.

Back to Bangkok, the Saga Continues

After nearly three and a half weeks in Pai we were ready to call it quits. It’s a testament to beauty of that place that a town as small as Pai was able to hold us for so long. In the coming weeks and months I would talk to other people who had been there, and the conversations usually went like this.

Me. “You were in Thailand, did you go to Pai?”

Random person at the hostel “Oh yeah we went there. We we’re going to stay for four days, but then we ended up staying for two weeks. It’s so crazy, we loved it!”

“Yeah the same thing happened to us. Did you stay at Circus?”

“No we didn’t but our friend did. We went there for a day though it seemed so cool.”

The Mountains in Pai ThailandThis conversation repeated itself as we made our way through southern Thailand, and across borders. The above conversation (word for word) happened in Singapore, 2,636 km away from that legendary town up in the mountains.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to Pai. The memories I have of the town are so closely tied to Joanna that it may be more painful for me than enjoyable. Walking through the town, going rafting on the river, drinking beer and playing pool, eating lunch at the same place every day. Dinners on the bed, in a bungalow that was hot in the day and cold at night. Even though Pai may be off my radar for the rest of my life, I look forward to finding other places like it, and creating new lasting memories. When in doubt, take the road less traveled.