What haven't we been up to?

Team,
Lots has transpired since the last entry; we will do our best to leave nothing out. Apologies for the long interval between blog entries, due in equal parts to laziness and being out in the jungle hiking. Here goes.
After spending an incredible day hiking to the nearby Erawan Falls in Erawan national park we left Kanchanaburi for Bangkok, and headed directly to the central train station Hua Lamphong. We have decided to start buying most of our tickets directly from the train or bus station to cut out the middle man or woman. Every guest house we have stayed at also functions as a travel agency, which can be extremely convenient, and also extremely extravagant given our budget. Further confusing is the claim seedier travel agents make that various trains/busses/planes are full, or no longer running, etc, when none of this is true. Deciding that we'd like to try and avoid that hassle we headed to the train station and bought our tickets directly from the state railway agency, which certainly was cheaper. Waiting at the train station for our sleeper train to arrive provided us with an opportunity to catch up on all the Thai music videos we've been missing staying at guesthouses without TVs. Unrequited love, heartbreak, temples and edible transforming snails figured prominently in the videos we saw.
Prior to boarding our train we had a few beers with an "off-duty" travel agent and Bangkok local named Tim. Tim taught us how to say a few phrases like, "Which way to the toilet?" as well as how to say "hello" and "thank you" in a masculine manner (so as not to sound like a ladyboy, naturally.) It may or may not have been Tim's birthday, and how off-duty he was can be debated as he encouraged us to sign up for a three day long trek in the jungle outside of Chiang Mai. What is certain is that he is an Obama fan; he kept jumping out of his chair and shouting into the city streets, "YES WE CAN! YES WE CAN!" while pumping his fists.
Our first trip on a sleeper train was great, although again, Tucker didn't fit too well. The next morning we still had a few hours to travel by train, so we enjoyed the views outside our beds which ingeniously turned into seats. Corn, sugar and rice fields dissolved into dense jungle as we flew by. Noontime we arrived in Chiang Mai.
The heart of Northern Thailand, Chiang Mai has a reputation for terrific food, and we were not dissapointed during our one night prior to trekking. A local curry soup with egg noodles called Khao Soi is our new favorite dish in Thailand so far, although Massaman curry is a close favorite. Other new Thai delights we've tried up here include Jackfruit, another crazy looking fruit. It is the size of a large balloon, covered in small green spikes, and has fleshy seedpods inside which taste like who knows what. We are realizing quickly that our vocabulary lacks the ability to describe some of the tastes we experience over here. Anyway, the jackfruit tasted a bit like banana, a bit like bubble gum.
We stayed one night in Chiang Mai, then headed out trekking with a group of ten or so foreigners and one incredible jack-of-all-trades guide named Mr. Ton. Trekking to me seems a lot like backpacking, but for some reason the rest of the world calls it trekking. Perhaps one reason we Americans don't refer to it as trekking is that a long running TV franchise may have hijacked the term "Trek". Hmmmmm. Highlights of the trek include meeting plenty of terrific travellers from all over the world, like round-the-world travellers Kevin and Bronwen whose blog you can see here http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Bron-and-Kev/ , riding on the backs of elephants while tailed by a baby elephant who weighed easily 500 lbs, meeting youths in a Karen Hill Tribe village and playing Thai kick-volleyball with them, and rafting down a nearby river on bamboo rafts. The trek was absolutely incredible. Our guide was good at absolutely anything he wanted to be good at; playing the guitar as well as three different traditional Thai instruments, navigating through the jungle while whittling bamboo forks and herding ten foreigners around, and perhaps most impressive, singing John Denver around the campfire seamlessly inserting his own verses to Country Roads.
The elephant ride... not too sure whether we'd recommend it. The treatment at times seemed cruel, the guides banging elephants on the head to get them to walk or stop, wielding sticks with a metal thorn attached to them which they use to turn the elephant by hooking it under their enormous ears then tugging. However, who am I to say whether an animal so large even registers a tiny human knocking it on the head, and how different is that treatment to putting spurs into the side of a horse or donkey? All things considered, not something I would wholeheartedly recommend.
We took another cooking course today, it too was terrific, and hopefully we now know how to make sticky rice!
Apologies for not including a photo of the cat with the previous blog. Check out the photo, and the video we included this time around from the hill tribe village.
Keep telling people about the blog, and take care,
Tucker and Katie

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