The first treck

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So it's been a couple of days now since we first head out to the jungle and our first treck in Chiang Mai.

Our 'trecking group' ended up consisting of 6 people; our tour guide Dong, myself, Max, the guy Mark we'd met the day before, and a couple - Andres who was Dutch and Leonna who was Spanish.
Together we were huddled into another truck (the main source of transportation in Thailand it would seem!) and taken on a three day journey that was full of ups, downs, and an altogether once in a life time experience.

Our first stop was lunch at a small farm tucked away from the main road; populated largely by a vast variety of dogs in every shape and size you could possibly imagine. Although dogs are kept as pets in Thailand (and we were assured despite several jokes about 'dog barbeques' that it is not common to eat them here), one family can have as many as 20 dogs roaming around their land. As none of the animals get neutured, they're sort of left to breed to their hearts content; which is great for all the puppy lovers out there like myself! I ended up making friends with a particularly cute puppy who allowed me to pet and play with him in exchange for bits of chicken from the rice. A friendship for life I reckon!!

After lunch we were hoarded back into the truck for about another half an hour. We drove up hill past crab-like trees and dusty paths; passing locals with baskets on their backs filled with dried palm-type leaves for thatching their roofs with. The sun was shaded from us by low hanging white clouds that skimmed the skyline lazily as our truck climbed the rocky gorge, up steep and narrowing roads that started as concrete and soon became just dirt.
Eventually, we arrived at the 'Elephant camp' and were informed that there were only two elephants available for our tour group of five. Each elephant has a two-seater chair attached to its back for people to ride on, so one person would have to ride (without support) on the elephants neck. Hardly a milisecond had passed before my hand had shot up, and so as we climbed the platform from which to mount the elephants from, I was guided onto the neck of a huge wrinkly beast. Behind me, Max and Mark were safely strapped in to their seat, and with one hand I reached behind me and clung on to the safety bar securing them in. Infront of me, on top of the Elephants head, sat a small Thai man holding a wooden stick with a metal hook on one end of it. My other arm I wrapped firmly around his waist. And then we were off! At an extremely slow pace, as our elephant kept stopping and slinging its trunk backwards at us, demanding to be fed the bannanas and bamboo roots we had been convinced to purchase before hand. This was in itself an incredible experience, the 'nostrels' moist and slimey, the trunk strong and forceful as it wrapped itself around whole banannas, before disappearing back behind a large head covered in prickly black hairs. As he walked, I could feel the elephants shoulder blades moving beneath me, the same black hairs corse and pricking the backs of my bare legs.
There was no real path, and we endured slips and slides and vertical drops, the elephant proving to be a lot daintier than it looked. Every couple of minutes we would walk past another platform, where thai women would be sitting with more bags of banannas for you to buy. After a bit, we all bought a beer, and sat merrily sipping away as we plodded along the beaten tracks. Towards the end, our 'driver' slipped himself off of the elephants head, and feeling a lot more confident, I rode the elephant hands free, with nothing infront of me except that big grey head and a startling landscape of dry and barren land. Definitely an experience I will be taking with me to the grave!

After the elephant ride, came a three hour treck up into the mountains. At first, this was particularly strenuous (I'm not exactly the fittest person in the world), but luckily the sun was still hidden and it was relatively cool. I soon found my second wind and was right up there at the front, working my way along ridges, through canopies of bamboo and shoots of green. After about an hour and a half, we stopped at a waterfall. The water cascaded down from high above our heads, with room behind it to sit and cool off. A natural pool lay at its foot, and we had soon stripped off into our swimming gear and dived in. The water was ice cold and murky, but felt clean and fresh against our hot skin. We slipped and slided across the unseen rocks beneath us; wading our way inwards and yelling in shock and joy as the cold took the breath clean out of us. It was so wonderfully remote and natural, not a sign of tourism around even though many tourists are taken there. Wild and exotic plants grew up from the groud, flowers whose leaves would close if you touched them, small dots of oranges and reds hidden amongst a vast plane of green. After about an hour we packed up our things and continued trecking upwards, towards the village where we would be spending our first night.

It was like something out of a film. Small huts built on stilts dotted the mountain top. To get there, we had passed rice field after rice field, dry and unused now until the rainy seasons. By each house was tied a pig or piglet and chickens and dogs wandered around freely. The toilet (a bedpan in the ground next to a bowl of water which you used for flushing) was in a small shed near the foot of the mountain, and we were greeted by a group of little old women as they came down to wash giant bowls of rice with the water from a hose pipe found next to it. We were shown to our sleeping quarters, a hut built for guests near to the toilet, which was filled with thin mattresses and mosquito nets. Underneath the hut, outside, was a huge wooden table where we would be eating our dinner and breakfast. We soon set about exploring, and by nightfall had been invited into one of the other huts to watch our dinner being cooked by our tour guide Dong, an ex chief. The food was cooked inside, but over a big open fire, and I was put in charge of stirring the vegetables as they simmered and cooked in a big pan of oil over the flames. As we waited, glasses of rice whiskey (an extremely strong but clean tasting alcoholic drink made locally) were passed around, and someone began strumming out thai songs on an old accoustic guitar. Eventually, we each helped carry a bowl over to the large wooden table, and ate companionably, a delicious meal of stir-fried vegetables, spicy cocounut-milk chicken, and rice. After dinner a large fire was built and the guitar was brought out again. The men passed around ciggarettes rolled in bananna leaves and with a special dried fruit inside that they said was like MJ. Above us, the stars came out and twinkled like saphires in an ink black sky. It was beautiful.
After everyone else had gone to bed, you could still find me, max and Mark sitting next to that fire, joined now by several sleeping dogs; talking animatedly about the world, and how we're destroying it. We all agreed that there was nothing like coming to somewhere as remote - yet happy - as this little village to make you realise how unneccessary so much of what we think we 'need' actually is. Although saying that, we also all doubted we could live that far away from civilisation!!

The night was cold, but we managed to each get a few hours sleep, piling the thin mattresses on top of one another so as to make the beds more padded, and huddling together for warmth. The next morning we had scrambled eggs with soy and toast, and waved sadly goodbye to the little village that had offered us so much warmth and joy the night before.

That next days morning trecking was not as easy. The sun was now out at full blast and the walk was all up hill. Me and max in particular struggled, and eventually wimped out and asked a farmer to let us sit on the back of his truck as he was driving to the same village we were heading to for lunch. Waving the others goodbye, we blissfully rode off, our sweaty bodies now cooling off and our aching limbs glad of the rest. We were joined at the village not long after by the rest of the group, and sat down to lunch against the most beautiful backdrop I have ever seen. Giant sweeping hills and valleys cascaded down beneath us, set against a clear blue, cloudless sky. The air was fresh and sharp in our lungs, and the sun warmed our backs. We stayed there for just over an hour, the others choosing to explore the village while I took a few moments time to myself to enjoy the view and have a little think. Thats the one thing about all this moving about, you hardly ever get a second to pause, to keep to yourself.... to mull things over. It was good to just take a second to stop.

The rest of that day was spent dividing our time between walking and visiting waterfalls. The first, we found a sort of natural slide, and slipped up and down on the currents of the river. This was great until we noticed that we were covered in miniscule leaches, which resulted in a scene much like the one in 'Stand by me', all of us screaming at the top of our voices as we ran out of the water pulling them off of us as our guide Dong sat laughing to himself in the corner. Turns out, these leaches dont suck your blood - although what they were doing clinging on to us then I dont know, but we were soon convinced to head back into the pool secluded off at the foot of the waterfall. The second waterfall we visited had a pool so deep at the bottom of it that we were able to jump from the top of the water fall into the water - a thing that took several hours of encouragement in order for any of us to work up the nerve! This second waterfall was also right next to where we would be sleeping that night. It was freezing here; the sun's warmth being pretty much eclipsed from us by the over hanging trees growing out of the mountain side, the wind blowing moisture from the waterfall into our faces, dampening our clothes and our bedding - which was only marginally protected by a hut, more windbreaker than walls, and a half attached roof. Dinner was again delicious, cooked pumpkin, rice, and green curry. But that night was terrible, we were all freezing and woke up feeling bruised and cramped from having practically slept on the floor. However, the next and final day was pretty fun - an easy walk mainly all downhill, heading towards the bottom of the mountains where we would be doing bamboo rafting. We ended up meeting up with several people we'd met on the truck ride from the train station to the hotel a few days previously, and we all climbed aboard our rafts with yells of glee. These rafts were literally a couple of bamboo branches tied together with strips of tire. At the front of each stood a small thai man, who guided the raft using a large pole, and delighted in splashing (and soaking) his rafts inhabitants. So it was an hour later, soaked but extremely happy - that we headed back to the trucks and were driven back to the hotel. Here, we dried off and had the much awaited showers that we had all been day dreaming about - before meeting back up for dinner and drinks in the hotel lobby. All in all, a pretty great experience!!

I am now in Laos, having got on a mini bus yesterday and travelled for five and a half hours to the thai border, where we spent the night in a small guest house with concrete beds, and made friends with two lovely british girls; Sophie and Alice. This morning we all woke up at the crack of dawn and went through the long process of sorting out our Laos visas, taking the boat five minutes across the water to the Laos border and passing through immigration. There we seperated with everyone else, who were all taking the slow boat somewhere else; and me and max checked in with the people on the gibbon experience, booked ourselves into a guest house, and came to find an internet cafe to make last minute preps before we head off into the real jungle tomorow on the second treck! Its raining a lot at the moment, which is apparently unexpected, so this is going to be a hard and not very comfortable trecking experience, but hopefully amazing at the same time.

More updates soon!!

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