Chiang Mai part 1
Trip Start
Aug 07, 2008
1
32
79
Trip End
Ongoing
Chiang Mai,
Thailand
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Chiang Mai greeted us with a ride into the city in the back of a pick up truck. you know how they put the camper shells on pick up trucks back home? well, they basically did that and then put benches on either side to fit around 6-8 people. it dropped us off just outside the old town walls. from there, eunice and i spent the next two hours or so walking around town with our packs looking at places to stay. we ended up checking out about 6 of them before settling on lanna discovery... for 250 baht (approx $7, we got a clean room w/o the comforts of A/C (this showed us how much we LOVE the comfort of air conditioning... we would eventually spend the extra $3 for the a/c the next time we stayed here). we had a shower, looked around town a bit and ended up booking a 3 day trek through the "northern thailand jungles". i was pretty stoked as the trek package only cost us $32 per person... and that included all meals, a night at the Black Lahu tribe mountain village, a night in a "traditional" long house, elephant riding through the jungle, bamboo rafting and white water rafting. sounds like a pretty good deal. well, it wasn't quite what it turned out to be... i'll get into that later...
we got to chiang mai on a sunday. we were fortunate as we got there just in time for the weekly sunday night market. imagine thousands of people walking around small streets lined with stalls after stalls of everything from souveniers, clothes and glorious thai food. the thing that eunice and i was most amazed at was the sheer size of the event. imgaine walking down wilshire blvd in LA from Vermont to Normandie, than making a turn to Olympic and back around... split that length through a few more streets and that's pretty much how big the night market was. we didn't journey through anywhere near the whole distance. in fact, eunice and i did only a small portion, mainly because we spent most of our time in the food areas! :)... everything was a dollar or less. naturally, i tried as much as i could. from skewered fish balls to papaya salads and fried chicken to noodle soups and fresh fruit drinks, it was a fat boy's euphoria! i loved it! i wish i had the appetite i had in high school as my eyes were bigger than my stomach. anyways, i thoroughly enjoyed myself.
ok... now let's get to the 3-day trek. let me just say again, that the trip was close, but not exactly like it was described in the brochures. regardless, eunice and i met some really cool people, had a great time, and definitely got our money's worth from the trip.
here's day 1:
picked up an hour late from the tourism office where we booked our trip. stopped by a "local market" to stock up on water and mosquito repellant. then an hour drive to the jumping off point for the jungle trek. we were greeted with pretty good country style thai fried rice... as much as you could eat. then a really nice jungle trek for 4 hours.. mostly going up and up. let's get into a bit more on the trek itself... let's use the term "jungle" loosely. "yes" it was jungle. but not "jungle" as you would imagine it in your heads. think more of a trek through a jungle trail. no using machetes to cut through foliage and no wild animals to cross paths with. it was a "nice" jungle, but jungle nevertheless. we pass through several streams, through banana trees, beside corn stalks and eventually ended up at the Black Lahu village... a native northen Thailand mountain tribe people. again.... "yes", native and a tribe, but not "tribal" as we would describe it... no native clothes, no amazing ceremonies over a campfire. just people living in the hills. regardless, we had a great time over an indoor campfire, home made green chicken curry, a few beers, live thai music (just a local dude with a guitar) and home made, northen thailand hill tribe moonshine!... yes... genuine thai fire water! it was a wonderful time of just laughing, talking and acting silly. then, bedtime. all 12 of us in the group went to bed in the same bamboo cabin dirty, showerless and tired. ahh... good times.
day 2:
more treking. 2 hours to a waterfall. it was a nice waterfall. and we went for a nice swim in it. but it was not the gigantic waterfall that everyone was led to believe. regardless, we made the most of it swimming, eating and relaxing. then... more treking. 2 more hours to the bottom of the mountain where we were pretty secluded. nothing to do but play cards, laugh a lot, talk about each others countries (five frenchies, two english, the two of us, an aussie, and dude from spain and a german). we talked politics, the upcoming election, healthcare, taxes, sports, food and way of life in general. day 2 came to a close over the campfire.
day 3:
short trek down to the elephant camp. some waiting around followed by a 30 minute elephant ride. short. we expected longer, but regardless, it was a blast of a time! we fed the elephants bananas as they carried us along a river then back up by the base of the jungle mountain. some of us even got sprayed as some of the beasts had a really funny habit of squirting water and snot at some of its passengers. next came the white water rafting. FUN for those who had never done it. and fun for those who had done it in the past. no class 5's or 4's, but some mean 3's that put eunice on her knees. no one fell off the boat though... too bad cuz its always a fun subject of poking fun afterwards. anyways, the rafting lasted about an hour (short) and that was followed by a quick 20 min down river ride on a bamboo raft. lunch then headed back to chiang mai to mark the end of our trip.
afterthought. not what we expected, but still FUN! and having a good group of people really made the difference. for the money... AWESOME! between eunice and i, we paid somewhere around $70 for three full days of activities, food and accommodation. that's so cheap considering our budget is $50 per day for both of us!
that night, all of us met up for dinner and hung out till 1am talking and dancing (not me of course) at a thai-reggae bar (that's a whole other experience in itself).
