Sawatdeeka, a few short days ago, we left the hustle and bustle of Chiang Mai and ventured out further north towards the hill tribes. Our 3 day trek entailed hiking for 15km, staying with both Koren and a Lahoo hill tribes and spending our final day bamboo rafting. But that doesn't even begin to explain the things we saw and experiences we shared on this leg of our journey.
As we were approaching the hot springs, where our trek was to begin, one of our two songthaew's started being followed by an adorable white and brown dog, later to be named Tofu. Tofu stayed with us while we enjoyed a lovely meal made by our two guides. After our meal, unannounced, Tofu decided to lead the first leg of our journey. A 5-6 hour hike to a Thai-Koren village.
Along the way not only did we see amazing scenery, experience truly the horror of air pollution in Northern Thailand, and take some pictures in a giant rice field. Tofu also got to play with a giant heard of grazing bulls, cattle and buffalo, which was really a sight to be seen.
When we arrived at our Koren village, Tofu was rudely greeted by some utterly territorial dogs, who were quite unhappy to have a visitor. After a long night of not sleeping, by both Tofu (who was afraid of the other dogs who were trying to pick a fight with him) and the 14 of us who almost froze in the middle of the night, because we clearly did not pack accordingly, we shared a delicious breakfast of homemade fried rice prepared by our guides.
There was a surprise in store for us that second morning before we left the village. We had the opportunity to meet, feed, take pictures with, bathe and if you were me, even get hit by the tail of a spectacular and majestic elephant. The experience was bitter sweet because even though everyone was super excited to meet this big guy, we all know the horrors that elephant tourism entails. This poor guy was able to roam free around the forest without his owner, but seeing him all shackled up in chains made us all quite sad.
When we left our first village and headed out on our day 2, 3.5 hour walk to our next village, we noticed that not only was Tofu with us, but so was one of the head instigators of the previous night: a fellow dog which we had named Diablo. About half way through our walk on the second day, we stopped at a section of the river to swim and enjoy a lunch of hand carved chopsticks, and noodles with tons of delicious vegetables served to us in bamboo leaves. If there is one thing that I have learned from my time thus far in Thailand, it's that all things taste batter when they are wrapped in bamboo leaves. To make things better, not only was the scenery spectacular with leaves falling off the trees in perfect harmony, but we enjoyed this lovely meal while sitting on a bamboo raft created by hand that morning by one of our guides, Ooh.
This is getting quite long so I'm going to skip a bit; We woke on our final morning to find out that Tofu and Diablo had become quite good friends and ran away together in the middle of the night. I think the fact that they were gone saved many of us some heartfelt goodbye tears.
Anyways, we packed up our things and headed down to the river where we hopped on our bamboo rafts and started our 2.5 hour voyage down the river. Oh my goodness what a spectacular sight to see. I must have said a million times how this would be the perfect location for a movie. It was so beautiful that it seemed surreal. Going down the river was not only beautiful, but it was fun and exhilarating. After every rapid we though the rafts would break apart, and sometimes they did. Ama was standing in the front leading one of the rafts when all of a sudden one of the pieces of bamboo snapped and her leg fell straight through. Luckily she and everyone else who received bamboo rafting battle scars were ok!
We wrapped up our trek, said goodbye to our guides and headed back to Chiang Mai for a rest day. Tomorrow evening we will board an over night train which will take us to Ayutthaya where we will spend the next couple of days exploring this out of this world ancient city. Hopefully I will have an opportunity to post again once we conclude there. But for now I just wanted to say thank you to my parents and the parents of everyone else here on this journey. You all have given us an opportunity to grow and have the experience of a lifetime and for that we are ever so grateful.
Until next time,
Em