Day 8 - Chiang Mai (rafting etc)

  Chiang Mai, Thailand
Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Today was our 'activity' day, as our aching limbs can definitely confirm!

We were collected from our hotel at "8am" (actually 8:45) and taken an hour into the mountains to our first activity of the day, which was riding an elephant.

We were a little nervous about the welfare/exploitation of the elephants, but thankfully when we arrived they all seemed well cared for, so we felt ok about it.

You walked up a ramp onto a boarding platform, and sat behind the owner of the elephant, who sits at the top of the elephant's neck. You're then locked into a rather uncomfortable 'seat', and off you go...



To be honest it was much better than I'd expected, a full hour all around the area, through rivers & streams, up and down mountains, really good fun.

You passed 'feeding platforms' every 20 minutes or so where you could buy bananas or sugar cane for the hungry wee thing. It seems that the owners rely on the tourists buying food for their elephants because they always raise their trunks expectantly after every feeding station!

Half way round the guide got off and motioned for us to take turns to sit on the neck area and pose for some photos on our camera. No problem, I thought, a few snaps should be ok, we'll be stationary, so it's not like I need to ride him round the park or anythi.... and with that he called the elephant forward and off we went juddering all over the place, with Katie in the seat, me up front and the guide following us behind on foot!!!

It was a bit nerve-wracking!



If any of you have ever ridden an elephant you'll know what I mean, they're not the easiest creatures to ride! Their skin is extremely course and hairy, their ears are huge flaps of skin with a really strong bone at the top (hard to avoid kicking when you have large feet set behind them!), and the elephants move around all over the place.

It all looked so easy when the owner was riding her for us, but it's very different when you're the one 'driving', trust me.

A few minutes later Katie swapped with me at the front and seemed to really enjoy her turn; she was also allowed to stay on the neck when the owner hopped back on, to cross the last river. I guess being a tall gorgeous blonde sometimes has its advantages. ;)



You can see how much Katie was enjoying herself, she was LOVING it!



God knows how many bananas we bought for our elephant, but I think it was about 5 bunches and 3 sugar canes, and still she wanted more. It seemed to have the Marks Family appetite!

Next on the list was mountain biking. We got back into the van (our group of 6 plus a guide) and headed up the mountain again.

Soon we stopped and our guide told us to get on the bikes, and explained that we would mostly be going uphill for the next 10 kms. Oh how we laughed... until we realised he was deadly serious.

It must have been 35 degrees outside and really sticky, not exactly ideal mountain climbing conditions on a bike?!



I started off like Miguel Indurain, thinking I was an absolute Tour de France legend, as the others literally ate my dust... However, I was to soon regret my impressive start, as the chasing peleton soon caught me up and due to some very bad luck with my chain coming off a few times (and stopping to take a few photos!), I finished a rather poor 3rd behind my lovely wife and our Wayne-Rooney-lookalike German colleague.

Of course I told Katie that I "let" her win, and assured her that if she'd challenged me I would have thrashed her, etc etc, but the truth is that I was absolutely knackered and she wasn't! Very embarrassing. Katie said that she didn't feel very tired, whereas frankly I nearly died! Fair play to her, but she MUST have been on a better bike ;)



Katie, me & the German dude were the only 3 people to finish this stage, which shows how exhausting it was. I feel tired just thinking about it... All the others in our group gave up, chucked their bikes onto the jeep which was following us and sat inside recovering, the lightweights!

So with heavy limbs we made our way to the riverside cafe for a spot of lunch, which was a tasty pad thai with spring rolls and chicken, some cucumber soup (flavour ?!), and finished off by some lush watermelon... I drank about a litre of Coke, determined to claw back some energy for a strong finale on the final event, the white water rafting.

During lunch our efusive and super hyper guide decided in his wisdom to tell us all that one of the girls in the morning group had fallen out of her raft/boat and had broken her shoulder on a rapid, and was now in Chiang Mai hospital. You should have seen the look on Katie's face... or on anyone else's to be fair! It wasn't exactly what we wanted to hear!

We then found out that another one of the girls doing the quad biking on the other tour that morning also had a bad accident and was currently en route to hospital, so we all sat there wondering who was going to make the hat-trick?!

We had a 'dummy run' of how to use the raft on dry land, and I was one of the chosen 4 to show our colleagues how 'easy' it was to operate the dinghy, however you spell it. Our guide was many things, but he was definitely not the best trainer, so he confused the hell out of us! It's safe to say that this didn't exactly boost the confidence of our group, put it that way.

When we got in our raft you could tell that our instructor was a bit of a 'mentalist', you can ALWAYS tell.

He ran us through all the drills that we'd just learnt, and said "this is what to do WHEN we fall in the water..."

At which point Katie turned a whiter shade of pale and asked him "are we DEFINITELY going to fall in?", to which our instructor answered with a beaming grin and sparkling eyes, and the confidence levels in the boat plummeted to Man-Utd-without-Ronaldo levels.

He then came out with the priceless comment "don't worry, there are rescue teams ready with ropes on all the dangerous bends." Grrrrrrrrrrrrreat, we were going to be lucky to get out alive!

After exchanging a few more worried glances, we set off. We shared our boat with the German couple, who seemed like nice people, plus the instructor/maniac. The German dude said he was carrying a football injury so wasn't firing on all cylinders, and his wife was wearing a very nice bikini... if she was about 3 stone lighter ;)

Me & 'Jurgen' were the powerhouse at the front of the boat, and he seemed impressed with my stories of conquering 10 foot waves while white water rafting on Locky's stag in Poland, which I explained in true Als "When I was in Colorado..." style!

Those of you that know me well will know that my right eardrum is perforated (i.e. it has a big hole in the middle of it), so I can't get any water inside it, otherwise it goes straight into the middle ear and leads to very painful ear infections. So I definitely had more reason to worry than most, but I really didn't want to miss out on the fun, so I just had to hope that we didn't get submerged.

The river was classed as "Class 4 rapids" which is apparently quite challenging. We sailed through the first rapids like a crack team of rafting commandos, and thought that we had it sussed!

After the second rapids our instructor shouted out "HIGH FIVE" and raised his oar into the middle of the boat, and we all followed suit with plenty of gusto. This is EASY, we thought...

Our instructor was obviously so confident in our abilities that he decided that he needed to get us soaked. He did a drill where we had to all go to the left side of the boat, and he was supposed to stay on our side.

OBVIOUSLY he also moved to the left side and hey presto, over we went. We all sank to the bottom of the river like stones, before bobbing up in a state of shock. At least the water wasn't too cold.

My ear was rather less impressed, and starting aching immediately, which was a bit of a worry as it was a THREE HOUR course and we were only on the second stretch, ten minutes in. Wonderful, thanks mate.

To cut a long story short(er), apart from my throbbing ear, the experience was absolutely wicked.

We negotiated rapid after rapid, only falling in twice more, and one of those was when attempting a "helicopter spin". This was where we all sat in the back of the boat so that the front could be raised up out of the water. At this point me & the German guy were instructed to paddle as fast as possible, causing us to spin around at high speed, with only the very back of the raft on the water! It was great fun, until RAY the instructor decided to tip us over, and in we plummeted. Again.

We also got stuck on a few large rocks, and the only way to get off them was to all slide into the opposite side of the boat, to create enough weight to pull it off the rock. However, obviously with all the weight at one end, you had to dive into the front section as soon as it started moving otherwise it was a 100% guaranteed wet world of pain...

With about 30 minutes of the course the monsoon rains came down again, which was fantastic. 

Using the oars and keeping in the right position was hard work, but the rain was soooo refreshing, I don't think I'll ever forget that part, rafting through rain after a good workout and a great time, with incredibly lush wildlife around us (it was like the Amazon, but with elephants drinking at the water's edge), being very sad that our fun day had ended, and with everything crossed that the days to come wouldn't be ruined by an ear infection...

Before we started the rafting I gave the tour guide my camera and asked him to take some pictures because he was part of the 'rescue team' on the banks, with ropes ready to throw to drowning rafters! Here are some of the photos he took from the side of the river, of some of the rapids:







When we got back to Chiang Mai we went to the famous night market, which was essentially a much more densely touristed (and expensive) version of the Sunday market that we went to last night. It was a load of rubbish.

We did have our full body Thai massages when we got back to the hotel, which REALLY hit the spot and chilled us out after our very active day.

We're off to the Thai/Laos border tomorrow, and we have a nice 6 hour coach trip so it's now time to charge up the old iPod!

Sorry for the long update but hope you're all well, please do drop us a line and let us know what's happening, we'd love to hear from you.


Al & Katie xx