Cooking, zipping and longest two days ever...

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Still in Chiang Mai

After 4 days of being in southeast Asia we are finally starting to settle in. The past few days have been quite busy and we have taken advantage of most of the activities they have to offer here in the north. We started out by taking a full day cooking course at the Thai Farm Cooking School. The school is located in rural Chiang Mai on an organic farm. All of the ingredients we cooked with were harvested from the farm and needless to say, the food was delicious. We started off the day learning about Thai cusine and we were able to make our own curry paste which was surprisingly quite a workout although I seem to sweat profusly regardless of what I'm doing in this country. After making curry paste we started cooking and we made a total of three dishes before sitting down to enjoy the fruits of our labor. After lunch we made another two dishes which were almost impossible to finish after having eaten so much for lunch. All in all it was a great experience and at the mere price of 900 baht ($30 CAD) I would highly recommend this school to anyone planning to visit the Chiang Mai area. After the cooking class we needed a bit of exercise so we wandered around Chiang Mai's famous Night Bazaar and after finding a few bargains we decided to call it a night.

Flight of the Gibbon and Hill Tribe Trekking

Thursday morning we were up bright and early in order to catch our bus for the Flight of the Gibbon tour. We were picked up at our guesthouse and after an hours drive we arrived at the main office in the middle of the jungle. Along the way we met Justin, a guy from Alberta who had been traveling through Australia, NZ and parts of Asia since January. We also met an Austrian family and a guy from Australia. Everyone in our group was nice and we had a great day ziplining through the jungle. After 3 hours of fun we hiked to a waterfall and then headed back to the main office for lunch. Lunch consisted of stir fried vegetables, Thai green curry, sticky rice and fresh fruit for dessert. Being the lucky one in the group, I had the added bonus of getting a stir fried caterpillar for lunch...mmmmm. After lunch we went back to the city for a Thai massage and a nice dinner along the river in preparation for our trek the next day.

The Trek from Hell

The title says it all... everyone says if you go to Chiang Mai you have to do a trek so we decided to give it a shot. We didn't want to sign up for any scams so we looked on the Thailand tourism website and found what they called a reputable company. The company was called Travel Hub and it was a complete joke. The first day we spent 8 hours in the back of a pickup truck with half the U.S. navy and some Europeans. After hours of weaving through rough mountain terrain we reached our final destination.. a cow pasture complete with massive piles of shit. Considering we are both farm girls we decided to look past this fact and continued our "jungle" trek. Apparently, they have not had rain in the past 6 months so the guides definition of a jungle was slightly different from what we were expecting. We were hiking through a barren dessert of lifeless trees.. were were lucky to find the odd leaf to protect us from the sun but it didn't help much considering it was 41 degrees out. Eventually we got to our overnight accomodation in a Karen hilltribe village. We slept in a hut on mats and thank god we had mosquito nets as I was attacked by a bug the size of most birds in Canada when I got up to use the "bathroom" in the middle of the night. The village was complete with pigs, cats, stray dogs, and roosters which decided to start crowing at 4 am but we were awake anyways...who knew soldiers could snore so loud. The next morning we had a delicious breakfast of rotten eggs and white bread with butter.. a great pre-trek meal. After breakfast we walked over the barren landscape for roughly 4 hours before arriving at an elephant camp/torture chamber. The animals were chained like prisoners and the Thai men sat on their heads while stabbing them with axe like tools when they went the wrong direction. Later we were put on display for the locals who splashed us with water as we floated down a river on a bamboo raft. I use the term river loosely...it was more like a trickle of water and a lot of rocks but it was entertaining either way. Finally, our journey came to an end and we went back to Chiang Mai. It was an experience to say the least.. probably something neither of us will do again but we have lots of funny stories and pictures to show for it. Tonight we are going to bed early as we haven't slept much lately... tomorrow we are off to Chiang Rai and then onto Laos later in the week...I forgot my camera cord tonight so we will post pictures soon

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