Oh My Buddha!!!!

Wow! So we got back from our 3 day trekk last night and when they said trekk - they meant it! We did elephant riding (Sara and my elephant kept sticking its trunk up and sneezing all over us and wouldn't move until we fed it our entire bunch of bananas - greedy bugger!), stayed with a hill tribe in a bamboo hut, and we did some "whitewater (pretty weak actually, though the scenery was stunning, Ian would have been dissapointed in the rapids) and bamboo rafting. Oh yeah... and we hiked strait up and down mountains for about 12 hours! Now I had thought that this trekk was geared towards tourists, so there would be a bit of walking, but mostly the activities would center around the other stuff - boy was I wrong. The first day we were picked up at our guesthouse and driven about 2 hours to the elephant camp. There we took an elephant ride down into the jungle for about an hour. The elephants were so cool, but much more ornery than they lead you to believe in "Dumbo". Ours didn't give a rats ass that we wanted him to follow the crowd and just did its own thing, practically taking us off the cliff a couple of times - I'm pretty sure intentionally. Then we took off hiking up up up and up the mountain. Our guides were really cool. We had this older, wise looking Thai man who had a mole with four long pieces of black hairs growing out of it. Then there were 2 21-year-old Thai guys, one who carried his guitar throughout the entire trekk on his back and played for us each night, mostly Beatles, Clapton, and traditional thai songs. The first night we stayed in a bamboo hut in this tiny hill tribe villiage (the Lahu tribe). Our guide told us that the Lahu people were not allowed to come down to Chiang Mai becuase there was too much competition for work and so the only way that they made any money was to sell some stuff to tourists who came on trekks all the way up to their hill villiage. Interesting. The next day we walked strait down (what goes up must come down, right?) the mountain to a waterfall and we slept near the waterfall in more bamboo huts. There was a big campfire and the guides busted out some Thai moonshine they had made out of sticky rice. It was very good - Sara thought it tasted just like sticky rice - I don't know if I"d go that far, it tasted like moonshine to me. hehe. We took shots out of bamboo shot glasses though which was cool. The third day, we walked for a bit and then did some rafting, first in regular plastic rafts and then on bamboo rafts (which were fairly underwhelming and we think it was just a gimic to get the tourists across the rocky part of the river that was too shallow to handle plastic rafts. hehe). I am pretty sure that our rafting guide didn't know what the hell he was doing. Oh well, it was fun though. All the people on our trekk were young and we had a blast with them. A fairly multi-national crowd: A german, a dutch girl, an austrain, four french people, an argentinian (from Mar Del Plata) and us. Good fun good fun. Now we are very sore and are heading to a smaller hippie villiage to recover for the next couple of days in a bungalo. Ok, go to the next entry to see pictures! Love, Sarah