Thai cooking and jungle trekking

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  Chiang Mai, Thailand
Sunday, October 21, 2007

Saturday, October 20th- 8:29 pm

Just completed a full three days of activities here in Chiang Mai, which have left me exhausted and entirely satisfied. :)

On Thursday, I attended a full day-long Thai food cooking class with Brendan. The morning started off with a trip to the local food market, where our instrustor taught us all about the local produce and ingredients. It was really great to finally learn about all the strange foods I've been walking by everyday. Because of Thailand's balmy climate, they have such a fantastic variety of fresh, local ingredients available to them everyday. This makes for some tasty eating and some really fun cooking. After choosing all the materials needed for our dishes, it was time to start cooking back at the school

Cooking delicious Thai cuisine

. We first learnt about the different rice types and how they are properly cooked. Looks like when I get back to Winnipeg, I'll have to find myself a bamboo basket! (to steam rice in) Perhaps somewhere in an Asian market? Then we learnt how to make five seperate authentic Thai dishes: phad thai, ton yum kung (hot and sour soup), laab-kai (savoury minced salad), made our own green curry paste from scratch, then made a green curry stir fry dish, and then finished off by making gluay-thod (deep fried banana) for dessert. All were truly excellent, as we ate the creations we made! I can't wait to get home and make everyone a thai feast! If, that is, I can find the ingredients back home! All in all, a very enjoyable and worthwhile day.

Friday and Saturday (today), I kept myself busy and throughly entertained, by going on a two-day, overnight jungle trek. I'm trying to think of how I would be able to best describe this experience, as I'm finding it hard to know where to start. It was a fantastic adventure! I booked it through my guesthouse, which is very convient as they picked me up and dropped me off right at my doorstep. And I could keep most of my gear in my room and only take my smaller backpack with me with only my essentials. That's one funny thing about most hostels I've stayed at here in Thailand: not only do they provide rooms for rent, but also a full service restaurant, internet cafe, travel agency and tour giude operators! Anything they can do to get the most of your money! :)

My fellow trekkers included: Brendan, Bernardo from Spain who could speak very little english, a couple from Liverpool, Cal and Catherine and a couple from South Africa, Adam and Carolyne. After a long and painful (bumpy) songthaew ride out into the hilly countryside, we arrived at our first stop: a spectacular waterfall

At the spectacular waterfall

. (A songthaew is basically a pickup truck with two sideways benches in the back with a covered roof. Handrails optional.) From where we were dropped off, it was about an hour hike there, but a small price to pay for such a beautiful sight! When I was on Ko Phangan, I saw a waterfall that was supposedly one of the king's favorites, but was nothing compared to this one. What made it even better was that there were no other people there and that our group had the sight all to ourselves! We spent about 45 minutes to an hour relaxing and playing in the icy water, before hiking to a restaurant for lunch. I say "restaurant" but really, it was in the middle of nowhere jungle and was in reality, just a local family's porch. I ate frind rice and fresh, delicious pineapple.

 For the rest of the afternoon, we hiked, in singlefile through the jungle. We had two Thai giudes with us from the guesthouse, Nai and Bee, who were both very funny and entertaining. Throughout our whole time hiking, Bee would point out neat things about the jungle. He showed us these tiny ferns that grow near water, that close up when they are tbumped or moved. Foliage with a sense of touch...interesting, eh? He also showed us these huge leaves from this jungle tree that, when you break off their stem, you can blow bubbles from the sap that comes out. These amoung other neato things. I coudn't even begin to explain how amazingly dense and lush the area is. The variety of plants and creatures that I saw is mind boggling. I wish I could show Baba all the beautiful butterflies I've seen! Small ones the size of dimes, with irredescent purple wings and furry blue bodies. Medium sized ones with black markings similar to the monarch, but instead of orange it's light blue to white. Then, I also saw a huge butterfly, at least the size of my hand with mainly white wings that srot of curl out at the bottom

Trekking Scenery 1

. Plus so many others. Unfortunetly most never seem to land or even come close enough for me to ever get a decent picture of them!

I have to say, that for me, the hike itself was not very challenging. I mean, it was long, but we took so many breaks to accomodate the out of shape, smoking tourists. :) The terraine was also never flat. We were always climbing up or scrambling down, sometimes very steep hills. Even with the heat and humidity, I found it was good fun. The others were poking fun at me, wondering if I could sweat or if I would ever stumble. I guess I can credit all my intense training on the Mantario trail! And maybe all the yoga I've done recently...?

We stayed the night at this small village where people form the Karen hilltribe lived. The few locals that we saw were very hospitable and nice. Once we arrived, we took turns showering before having something to eat. This was my first experinec with the Thai style shower. Which is simply a tap from the wall about shoulder height, which empties into a large ceramic urn that has a plastic bowl in it. Really all you do is use the bowl to pour water over yourself. Remember that this tap is in an unlit, wooden shack next to the pig pen. It was great fun! Dinner that night was a great feast of rice, potatos, curried pumpkin and stir fried vegetables

Trekking Scenery 2

. After all that hiking, I ate two whole platefuls! After dinner, we sat around and talked and Bee showed us a few games using matches and a peice of string. Sounds silly, but it really kept us entertained for about two hours before foks satred trickelling off to bed! We stayed in a dorm type setting that had mosquito nets hanging over mats on the wooden floor. Except for the hard pillow, I had a sound sleep.

This morning, we were up early for breakfast and started hiking at about 9 am. Today was an easier day for us. It was only an hour of hiking before we arrived at the village of another hilltribe, named the Lisu. Here the local women were very pushy, trying to sell you handmade bags and silver bracelets. Sort of a weird experience, since you are stopping in their village, so you sort of fell a if you wolud like to support them. But at the same time, I did kind of wonder if they did make all the bracelets, bags and trinkets themselves or not. Or does that even matter? So anyways, I did buy a few bracelets, almost just so they would stop hounding me. The next part of our trek was a ride trought he jungle on an elephant, which for me was a fairly horrible experience. For serveral reasons. First, I just do not like the idea of riding an elephant and having him carry you when you could easily get there another way. Second, riding an elephant is just not comfortable, no matter what they say. Man oh man, is my behind and back ever sore now!

Finally, we got off the elephants at another Lisu village (no, no more souvenirs please!) and boarded a long bamboo raft to take us an hour and a half down river. This was very enjoyable for me. Very calm and peaceful and a great way to see the jungle. We saw this spider that had a web between two branches of a tree that must have been about four feet by three feet in size! Incredible! I wonder what kind of creatures he must catch in a net that large! The river itself was moving at quite a good pace and did have the occasional turbulent rapids in it to keep thing exciting. When the bamboo raft ride was done, we stopped at a retaurant for lunch and then we were picked up by the songthaew to take us back to Chiang Mai. At this point the whole team was quite tired and ready to get home and rest. It was a mighty full day and I'm sure I will rest well tonight!

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