The fruits of our travel agent visit paid off today with a days trek into the hills around Chiang Mai, although there wasn’t much walking involved! The first visit was to some hill tribes, a few straw huts set amongst some paddy fields with old women attending to their stalls, strangely enough selling tourist tat! We’d paid extra to visit the long-neck “Karen” tribe, whose women from an early age start wearing ever increasing numbers of brass rings around their neck, causing it to elongate. The place had a touch of theme-park feel to it, added to by the mopeds lined up behind the shacks.
Back in the bus, we suddenly stopped and reversed to a waiting kart being pulled by camel cows! Turns out that someone beat me to it and called them “Ox”, rather boring if you ask me… The Ox kart ride involved us sitting in the back whilst the driver grunted and poked at the Ox to make them move along, whilst a couple of kids ran behind and secretly got a free lift.
The next excitement was an elephant trek, now I thought Asian elephants were meant to be small, but the beast we got on was huge, with us 3 or 4 metres above the ground. The thing was also banana powered, every couple of steps a huge trunk would reach back over his head to where we sat, until a banana was placed in it’s finger like grasp. Before too long he’d eaten the whole bunch, but the trunk still came up, huffing and blowing snot over us until he eventually gave up. We almost got a soaking as the elephant sprayed water through his trunk to cool himself down, good job his aim was good, and the water was cleanish anyway.
The final activity was bamboo rafting. We’d been warned to bring a change of clothes and leave all belongings behind as we were going to get very wet. It turned out that the ride was very gentle, to the point of relaxing. We only got wet as the raft was partially submerged with five people on board, but I had faith in the discarded tyres holding the bamboo together.
That night we boarded the night minibus north towards the Thai-Laos border. We were never going to relish spending the night on the road, but by 3am we’d arrived, enough time for a decent sleep, and worth the day we saved!