Made it to Chiang Mai (northern thailand!) by night/sleeper train -- the best transport ever. You just sleep alll the way through the 12 hours ride and it was great! 22$ = not a bad deal at all! Chiang Mai is awesome. Where bangkok is crazy chiang mai is a bit nutty but much more laid back and the old-city spirit is still existent here and contained within the old brick walls. We left on the 28th morning to go for a 3 day, 2 night trek into the jungle! It was great, so much walking through the jungle and villages (about 14 hours) but a good workout. We went to some hill tribe villages and saw some of the ladies working on their hand looms making lovely scarves and sarongs. We started the trek off with a bamboo raft float down a river which was pretty cool. Then walked for a few hours to the first village where the locals cooked a delicious traditional thai meal with sticky rice, green curry made from small green eggplants , basil, tomato, cauliflower, broccoli, long beans and chicken - all of which were grown in the village. Then we fell asleep in an open bunk house on floor mats with mosquito nets. it was a good sleep but pretty cold (super chilly up north in the tribes!)
The next day we walked through many different dried up rice terraces, saw lots of cows with their metal and wooden bells tinkling away down the valleys. Our main guides name was Nop but on the 2nd day we had another younger guide lead us and he barely spoke english so it was a pretty silent walking day. We arrived at our next sleeping spot... a bunk outside a village right by a waterfall!! So refreshing to take a swim, and then we had dinner and our guide and his friends played guitar and sung some bob marley and thai songs. Then one of the guys disappeared with his headlamp to the waterfall and came back less than 20 minutes later with a large waterbottle full of frogs!! Mairi asked if she could go hunt them and our silent younger guide took her down the river and walked all the way up hunting frogs! she caught a few.. turns out you need a really powerful headlamp to 'blind' the frogs and see their eyes glowing at night and then you have to strike fast to capture them! they also had a weird bamboo noose contraption to catch rats and they caught 2!
The next morning we had our toast and egg (plain jane tourist breakfast) and the thai guys had some fish they had caught that morning and had made a fish + lemongrass soup, rice, pork bits and frog patties - that were herbed and spiced so well there was no way to know there was frog in it! Mairi had some of the thai breakfast and it was delicious.
On our last day of the trek we walked for a while, had some lunch and then went on an hour long elephant ride. It was neat to ride them and scary at times going up and down some steep hills, but it was fun. Some of the elephant 'guiders' weren't so nice though and had these rebar/stick devices they would smack the elepants with.. but some of them were nicer and just nudged the elephant onward using their bum (the guides sit on the head of the elephant, the tourists on a metal seat on the back) Then we were loaded up into a truck to head back to Chiang mai.
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