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Published: January 4th 2008
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We just arrived back from our trek and it was crazy! We went into the mountains to stay with a hill tribe, trekked through the jungle, rode elephant back up the mountain, and then bamboo rafted back down.
The trek began by driving into the mountains around Chiang Mai. We started trekking from a villiage that had a baby monkey and Allison got to hold him. He was so cute and he even screamed when he got scared!
We started walking through the jungle and with in five minutes we almost walked into a spider that was almost the size of my hand. There is a picture of it but there is nothing else in the picture to show its relative size. We hiked for an hour and stopped at a waterfall that we all climbed up. After the waterfall, we hiked through rice paddies and beautiful scenery up to the top of a mountain to stay with a hill tribe. The hill tribes make money by selling home made items and right when we got in tons of small children swarmed us. They would put beaded jewlry in your hands and right in front of your face. If
you were looking at another child, the others would slap your arm gently to get you to look at them...they were very sweet, though. The village was filled with dogs and chickens and pigs and cows that were all free to roam around. We had a wonderful traditional Thai dinner in a candel-lit hut and sat around the fire for hours singing American songs - they called our travel guide a Thai iPod. All 12 of us on the trek stayed in a swaying hut that stood on stilts that was pretty open to the elements, which is a problem because of the spider I mentioned. We slept on the ground and each sleeping space had a mosquito net. It was cold and hard, but at least the roosters and pigs started up at 4 AM.
After breakfast, we hiked to a different section of the mountain and went to an elephant camp. There were probably about 15 full size elephants and a baby or two. We had to climb up onto a wooden platform to get on the elephants, and they carried us up the mountain for about an hour. It was insane! It was not just lazy
walking, they were climbing up tight, curvy, mountainous stuff, and we thought we might fall off a couple of times. We sat on the elephant's back and for the entire scary ride, he would reach his trunk over his own head for us to feed him bananas. We were worried that the elephant was not paying attention to what he was doing! We finished the ride and just stood around and fed them. After that we drove to the river and went bamboo rafting. The raft was just 9 bamboo trunks strapped together. They were about 20 feet long and we just had 4 standing people to a raft. Ammaron got to steer from the back. The river ride went for about an hour and we went through slight rapids and drifted down river seeing all kinds of jungle....stuff.
Anyways, it was awesome and tiring and we're back now. We have to go to dinner and rest up for our 7:AM flight to Cambodia.
Hope you all had a Happy New Year!
PS - Shoutout to Miles, Kayla, Ariel and Josh...thanks for the cute pic guys.
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Anthony
non-member comment
Hey!
Hey guys this looks really cool. I like the pic of you guys on the elephant! NICE! Hope you have a great trip and Happy New YEAR!