After 4 hard days work at Mirror Foundation we started our Trek to the Akah village which is a hill hill tribe in northern Thailand. The trek started out with a drive to our guides village where he showed us the Hill Tribe village museum which was an eye opening experience to see how these villages work and the tradition that the Thai government is trying to make disappear, which would mean the loss of all these great cultures in Northern Thailand. But i digress after the museum we started our hike which we didn’t quite know what we where getting into at the time but it was defiantly the hardest hike on the trip for sure, we walked through rice fields and which was the easy part but as we came to the jungle we hit a hill which was a 50 degree angle up and 5 km to the top which we ended up not making which is a bummer, because we didn’t get to see the view at the top. After the very long and hard uphill we started to walk through the dense forest walking over fallen down branches and trying not to walk into spider webs only the tall hit them (Caspar), we hit the end of the forest and hit a dirt road which was a huge relief to everyone to see a road and no more uphill!!! after a short walk on the road we made it to the village a 5 hour hike which everyone was happy to be over with. we all made it to our house and settled in for a nice long sleep we went to bed a 7 the earliest I’ve ever been to bed, am I a grandpa now?????
Day 2 and 3 Hill Tribe Village
We woke up the next morning and got bamboo for making plates cups and spoons such cool stuff you can do with bamboo, for lunch they cooked everything with bamboo it was our favorite white rice and egg with red pepper flakes for the bold. then we watched the village people make a beautiful bracelets for us and we chilled out for the rest of they day till dinner pumpkin and rice very delicious. that night the tribe had a ceremony with dancing and music playing with some dancing which most of us had a hard time getting down without the counting of Parker who got it down very easily. After that 5 people decided to sleep outside on a water tower to look at the moon and star gaze you can guess who did it. the others slept inside. the next day we were off back to Mirror Foundation after a ceremony to give us good luck from the Tribe people, this hike was a breeze compared to the first one we did it in 2 hours so easy as we entered the last village we were picked up by trucks and taken to ride elephants which was kinda sad seeing the elephants chained up being treated not the best. After the elephants we were off to banana bread which was delicious 5 baht banana bread some people bought 6 banana breads because they were so good. a very good surprise to the day was seeing Mike at the mirror foundation so good to see him and have nice talks you can guess what we did next had a spirited game of volleyball with mike and other volunteers Carpe Diem beat the volunteers. we then went to the night market and meet up with Taryn, Emma and Alisha big hugs all around was very good to see them our group was not the same without them.
We headed off to Chiang Mai by bus and got to our hostel to get our costumes ready for Halloween everyone put lots of efforts into there costume and we meet up with Mike for some karaoke which was really fun and everyone had a great time singing classics like Singapore cowboy and country roads take me home. and then the two boys Andy and Liam spit some hot fire on the mics which almost burned the place down because it was so hot. more Halloween photos will be posted next week!
