Tacomepai farm

A map of Tacomepai, slightly outdated

I arrived at Tacomepai last Thursday.  I took a bus there from Chiang Mai.  There are two kinds of buses that run to Pai, the public bus is about 80 baht and the VIP bus is 150.  I had planned on taking the public bus but I had trouble finding the ticket office and I was pretty tired from the walk to the bus station so I would 'splurge' on the smaller minibus.  It has AC too!  The road to Pai is steep and winding and although the distance isn't that far as the crow flies it takes about 4 hours to get there.  Apparently people get sick on the ride all the time, almost everyone at the farm said that someone one there bus started vomiting, and I was wishing I read Thai on the way because I saw a road sign on the way up with a stick figure bent over a toilet and I'm curious as to what the text said.  Fortunately no one one my bus became ill and the ride went pretty smoothly.  The driver was even nice enough to drop me off at the entrance to the farm so that I didn't have to walk the 6 km back from town.

Mud house

Takomepai is an organic permaculture farm and they've built a dozen or so bungalows around the farm for guests as well as several other structures, a classroom, kitchen and a yoga studio.  I lived in the mud house which is separated into two areas, the bedroom has a large bamboo platform for a bed and belongings, and the bathroom is right outside, surrounded by a mud wall.  It was really nice!  And I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that it had electricity and hot running water.  Everyone was out when I arrived but I found a woman at the main house who gave me a mosquito net and blankets.

I've never used a mosquito net before and I was reminded of a Coursera course I took which had talked a lot about why it can be hard to get people to keep using them.  I was using a pretty small one which made it hard to hang from the rafters in the mud house, and then I had to go through a couple before I found one without too many holes.  I'm sure that there is probably a better way to set it up but the way I had mine, I couldn't sit up in bed because the top caved in in the middle, and if I wasn't careful there would be large gaps along the bottom.

I never quite understood the layout of the farm and kept discovering new and exciting things.  I went out one afternoon to explore.

The countryside is absolutely beautiful

A bike powered washer and dryer!  Such a great idea!
Unfortunately it wasn't working when I was there.

The rice fields

Tree house bungalow

Our kitchen from the outside, we had a fire pit outside
where we could sit and talk

 We ate as a group for most meals.  In the morning we would have sticky rice and fruit.  (I have developed an obsession with sticky rice and mango!) We had a few meals at one of the restaurants down the street but on my last day one of the new guys, a Thai American, made a great green curry soup!  Dinner was generally some version of rice and vegetables, cooked in pots over the fire.

Electricity and a fridge in the kitchen, very convenient

Our indoor fire pit where we made
 tea and coffee and dried our dishes

We never used the oven but we did make use of the clay
thing below to cook our food using pots and woks

Bamboo dishes!

They do everything with bamboo here!  We were working on another farm one day and they went out into the forest to cut down some bamboo to make plates for us to eat our bamboo soup.  And all the work we've done to buildings on the farm has been with bamboo.  

Water purification tank

The farm uses partly water from town and partly water from the mountains which is diverted to an aqueduct which is used to water the rice fields, for the showers and also filtered for drinking water.  The water tanks have several layers of stone, sand, ash, and charcoal which clean the water.

There's a pig at the farm!  (I was told he is called crispy...
as in crispy bacon)

The classroom, complete with wifi