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With 2073 bends in the tortuous road between the northern Thailand towns of Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son, it is little wonder that many travellers leap off the bus off at Pai, mid-way along the 248-km route.

“I stopped here for a day — three weeks ago.” I often overhear comments like this in Pai, a once snoozy hill village that has blossomed into Backpacker Central for young travellers. This is where Thai meets tie-dyed. Where sheeshas, Reiki, reggae, dreadlocks are now more common than rice noodles and somtam salad.

Gladly putting behind me the 137 km of snakes-and-ladders curves from Chiang Mai, I slip into the hot mineral water tub on my deck at Thapai Hotspring Resort. When I extract myself at last from this soporific soaking I know there will be fresh river fish and cold beer waiting in the restaurant. In 1991 Pai had seven guesthouses and three restaurants. Now there are around 150 places of accommodation, from backpacker dorms to unpretentious spa retreats, and a similar number of cafes and restaurants.

As a quiet market village, Pai was home to mostly Shan people, originally from nearby Burma. And then “the dream catchers” started to drift in — creative wanderers, Thai and farang (foreign), drawn by Pai’s cool, 600-metre altitude, its hot springs, pretty river and the exotica of the surrounding Karen, Hmong and Lisu hill tribes.

“The longer you stay here, the deeper you go,” muses Jenny, an English backpacker sitting in a Mac-powered internet shop that’s called, yes, Apple Pai. She’s staying at a guesthouse that’s aptly named Pai In The Sky.

It’s easy to see why travellers and Thailand’s version of bohemians become so comfortably immersed the life of Pai. “A major activity in Pai, well-practiced by both locals and tourists, is simply doing nothing,” advises my guidebook. I go in search of this nothing but the options are exhausting. I must choose between learning Thai cooking, Thai language or Thai massage, or watching Everton vs Wigan or numerous other roundball derbies live on satellite TV. I might buy any amount of hill tribe tat and embroidery from brightly garbed women of the Acrylic Tribe, get a tattoo, hire a motorcycle, go rafting or try extreme elephant trekking (“no seat and swim with elephant”).

Taking the line of least resistance, I opt a traditional massage where my choice is simply a one or two hour session? A languid German lad flops onto the adjacent mattress. “How long are you doing?” I ask. “One month so far,” he replies.

Pai is an ambling town, where the folk in drag on the main drag include Moslem women in burquas, half-naked Viking sadhus and flamboyantly garbed Thai teens; where every second café declares “WiFi Here” or “Laptop Friendly.” It’s like Bangkok’s Kao San Road gone bush.

“Pai is the kind of place I'd be inclined to despise if there wasn't so much that I liked here,” one blogger noted frankly. Having morphed from Buddhism to Buddha Bar, from Shan to Shakhira and from opium to cappuccino in the space of one generation, Pai — now with a population of around 10,000 — is riding a wave of prosperity.

It is also at the point where the hardheads meet the airheads, with the former, the investors, reaping very good financial returns, to the point that earlier visitors now look back with nostalgia at the snoozy, misty Shan village that once was. But that was yesterday. Today everyone wants their piece of Pai.

First you hear them, then you see them. As our raft bounces down the watery stairs of a rapid on the Nam Khong River, west of Pai, and a stained-glass ceiling of jungle closes over us, the next raft comes round the bend and into sight, shrieking with delight. Noi, Cherry and a group of their Bangkok office pals are on the river, hooting all the way it would seem to Mae Hong Son.

The 45-kilometre river run will take us a day and a half. After a brief demo on how to paddle, we stroke clumsily away, six passengers to a rubber raft, plus a Thai boatman at the stern. Our flotilla of five rafts holds a mixture of Westerners and Thais.

We drift down a burbling water alley colonnaded by arching stands of bamboo and teak. Silence is a concept much admired in the abstract by the Buddhist Thais, but in practice it is nowhere near as much sanuk – fun – as making noise. So we stroke and scream our way through alternating rapids and calm reaches. There’s a sapphire sky overhead and the water is clear and warm. Warm is good because surprise attack water fights are a part of any rafting trip.

Post-drenching, we drip dry in the sun, only to get doused again, either by slamming through the moderate rapids or catching another watery broadside from a passing raft. For the Thais the thrill is amplified by the fact that few of them can swim.

Late afternoon we stop the jungle camp where we will pass the night deep in the Lumnampai National Park. A long, sheltered sleeping platform with bedding and mosquito nets accommodates us all comfortably. Cooking stoves are lit and soon there’s a feast to tuck into. With a million stars snagged in the trees above and a thousand frogs burping in the blackness, we share that unalloyed bush pleasure of sitting around the campfire, yarning with newfound friends.

Next morning, after a chilly night, we’re back into the boats, stroking through the mists. “There’s a hot spring just here. Pull the boat in,” says our guide Pu. We hop ashore and dig a trough in the sands, catching the piping hot water that bubbles up. Soon we are wallowing, happy as pigs, and slowly turning into a tom yam farang soup. “Time to go,“ says Pu, and we stroke on, coming to the confluence of the Nam Khong and Nam Pai rivers. From here the rapids double in size, to around one and a half metre waves. So to does the squealing volume of the Bangkok Ladies Boat. It’s like Beatlemania come to the jungle.

If Pai is a Thai-farang fusion tourist town, then Mae Hong Son, where our whitewater adventure ends, is a living, working Thai town. A place of monks and lakes, teak and woodsmoke, shophouses and hill folk. And that is the beauty of this northwestern border town close to Myanmar’s Shan State. Yes, I can find a good cappuccino at the Crossroads Café — better than any in hip-hopping Pai — and there is a night market for hill-tribe crafts, with most shoppers being Thais not foreigners.

For sunset I hoof it up a thousand steps to War Doi Kong Mu temple that overlooks this town known as "the City of Three Mists," thanks to its fogs in winter, forest fire haze in summer and rainy mists in wet season. I don’t want to leave lovely, misty Mae Hong Son but when I must, it is by air. The lofty pleasure of leap-frogging those 2073 bends back to Chiang Mai in 25 painless minutes is considerable.

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