Day 92
Trip Start
Sep 14, 2006
1
86
169
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Chiang Mai,
Thailand
Friday, December 15, 2006
The first activity was elephant trekking. I'd never ridden on an elephant so this was a first for me. It was good fun, I was more interested in looking at the animals from ground level though! The weirdest thing was getting on. You need to take one step to get into the seat and that step is on the elephant's head. It felt wrong to do that to him but it was the only way - it felt a bit squishy like if you stood on a leather-seated chair. We bought him some bananas and Gabi was feeding those in every two minutes till they ran out - for some reason she had been sat on the neck where as I had the seat to myself
1 Our Elephants arriving
. He would lift his trunk up when he wanted one and we were glad to oblige! The rest of the afternoon was climbing up the hill to the Lahu tribe whose village we would be staying the night at. That trek was mostly uphill and the two Dutch women were struggling a bit.
The village was bigger than I expected and we were shown to a bamboo hut which was more of a huose! It had a basic kitchen where some local women were preparing dinner, it had a large "front room" and then two adjoining bedrooms. The whole group had one of the bedrooms and the Lahu family had the other. I got showered in a bamboo cupboard with cold water but after the trek I was fine with that.
Dinner was great - we all sat around a fire in the front room area and sat cross legged and munched through some nice dishes of local food. The Russian guy was having beer after beer and getting steadily drunk - we were calling him "Borat" by then after the charachter in the new movie. He has the same clumsy mannerisms and lack of English and tact - with humerous results for everyone present. He bought two bottles of Thai whiskey too and drunk most of it himself - only Gabi joined him and had a glass herself.
The evening was spent with the two guides taking turns playing guitar - limited singing back from the group meant that it fizzled out pretty quickly into smaller conversations. Outside the night sky was full of stars and I watched a couple of satellites tracking over - that reminded me of Mongolia and its clear nights there.
