Trekking

Just got back from our 3 day trek - went north to an area just south of Chiang Rai. Day one was a 2 hour walk to a freezing cold waterfall, followed by another 2 and a half hours to our camp site (that was about 1 hour walking, and the other hour and a half waiting for Ollie to finish taking photos). Beautiful walk, but very hot, especially as we were going up hill for most of the time. Was feeling a bit crappy (neck ache and headache) when we arrived at our camp, so relaxed watching Map (our guide) cook green curry (without the wee snapping turtle found at the camp - this he assured us was being saved for dessert). When it came to eating the food, i tried a spoonful or two and the world started spinning so i went to bed. Shame, cos it was a really nice curry! Woke up 13 hours later feeling much better
Day two, and i was determined not to overheat this time. Hat was soaked in water before we set off, but it turned out that this was not nessissary - we were at around 1800 meters and staying there, so the air was much cooler. This also meant that me and Ollie could spent more time beating each other up - Thailand has been too hot so far for practicing our Kung Fu. We had started the day praticing Crane form (7am on top of a rainforest covered mountain doing Crane form is a great way to start the day), and it just got more violent from there on in. We trekked for around 3 hours or so before we reached a wee village where we were to have lunch. Sat enjoying our noodle soup and watching the rain fall for an hour or so before meeting our elephants. Wasn’t massively excited by the prospect of riding through the jungle on an elephant i have to admit, but it was excellent!! Ollie and me shared an elephant - she got to sit on its head, me on its back. We were on it around an hour and a half, most of the time being taking off into the bush in search of bamboo. Eventually, with very sore bottoms, we got to the village where we were to spend the night. Really picturesque wee village, with friendly people that actually liked being photographed - which meant of course that we saw very little of Ollie for the next 12 hours. Thankfully, we were doing the trek with some excellent people - a group of 4 Austrians and a German couple. An excellent evening was had drinking beer and being shown how to turn the elephant on a bottle of Chang beer upside down (thanks Stephan!).
The final day started just as early for me as the second (7am), but with much less sleep beforehand (Ollie had already been up an hour wandering the village taking photos). After our American breakfast (which meant we had pineapple with our toast), we trekked for a few hours, stopping at several villages on the way. We ended up on the obligatory bamboo raft for a gentle trip down the river to end. The first raft we got on fell apart as soon as we sat down, so we swapped to another. We neednt have bothered. This one started falling apart 5 minutes into the trip. The 4 Austrians were on one raft (also falling apart), and we shared ours with the German couple, Stephan and Lisa. Nice wee green fruit things that were floating in the river around us turned out to make excellent ammunition, and so the battle started. It ended with Ollie swimming up to their raft and forcefully pulling away a big chunk of bamboo - she manged to swim off with it while the Thai ‘captain’ looked on helplessly. This of course encouraged the German couple to go and steal their oars (i was left gaurding our raft from any retaliation). The trip ended with our raft being held together with Ollies sarong (the other raft had completely fallen apart by this stage, although Julian did a great job of stopping the bits from drifting off).
An excellent trip with some cool people! So we are back in Chiang Mai now, planning what to do next. Think we might head south east…

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