Northern Thailand

Showered and clean and ready to blog...

I returned today from a three day "trek" in Northern Thailand. They call it trekking to make the tourists feel better about ourselves. We left Friday morning at 8:30 am, with Boone our guide. There were seven of us in the group, two British girls, a girl from Finland and a boy from Japan. We drove, or sat in the back of a truck, (now now there were seats) for three hours, had lunch and then began our trek to a waterfall. That was the easy part, next we hiked three hours into the first hill tribe village where we were to spend the night. Now, the Thai don't believe in switchbacks so it was three hours of straight up the mountain, luckily though it is the dry season or it is would have been three hours slipping up the mountain in the mud. We got to the first village, and found our bamboo "hotel" picked a dusty mat and crashed. Boone made our dinner, but he lost serious points for putting pineapple in the chicken! We spent some time that evening playing with the kids down at the river. We waded into the river, while they stripped down and jumped in. Except for one little modest girl, who had no pants so she just slipped her shirt down around her waist - one must always be a lady!
The next day we had four hours of trekking in the morning to get to the rafting camp - where the fun began. We bamboo rafted down the river to our next destination.
A bamboo raft is about twelve long pieces of bamboo tied together, with a triangle in the middle for bags and another piece of bamboo running along the raft lengthwise, which is where you are to sit for three hours, while two crazy Thai men pole you along. Our back guide was the "director" of the rafting camp, which just meant that he had been up and down this river enough to know that without a few tricks we would get pretty bored. So, he used his bamboo pole like a straw to drip water on us, or just splash us. He tied a little piece of stick to the end of his pole and would drag it on your leg so you kept swatting and swinging at the "bug" that was probably eating you alive. He would yell "snake" so you'd duck quickly, when there was only a dangling root. Or yell, "elephant" when there were really water buffalo by the river. Needless to say he kept us laughing, if not at his tricks then at his toothless smile, and deep belly laugh.
We spent last night with another hill tribe, and this morning we headed home by way of the elephant camp, where we took a ride down the river. Great fun, especially when your elephant would uproot entire trees to snack on during the walk.
We arrived home "Libra Guesthouse" here in Chiang Mai this evening, where we plan to celebrate Chinese New Year in style!