As I said in my previous entry I went away for 3 days into the jungle with my guide Izz. Izz was brilliant and it was the first time I had a female guide for something like this. She was really funny and had a proper laugh with us as a group. There were 9 of us in the group: Me, Andy, Bri, 4 more English, and 2 Spanish girls. We all got on really well and it was strange socialising with the English lot as they were all 18. In some ways I felt really old and in others it was like we still had the same conversations! Strange. We had a meeting the night before the trek where we introduced ourselves to each other and Izz told us what it was we were doing and what we would need for this trek.
In the morning we got up really early as the start of our trek took us 3 and a half hours into the jungle in the back of a pickup. On the way there we found a couple of road laying teams pouring sand onto the road and levelling it out over pot holes. So we jumped off the pickup and gave them a hand! Izz told us they would work most of the day doing that and would only get the equivalent of about 2 pounds a day. We stopped off at a small market and bought some sweets and stuff for the kids in the villages that we would meet in the trek. By the time we got to our stop we had suitably gotten to know each other and were ready to set off. At the start of the trip we were shown how the tribe members set up traps to catch the small animals that they could eat in the jungle. Some of them looked really deadly too! The first day trek was excellent fun and Izz showed us all the different things we could eat or use for medicinal purposes in the jungle. We walked about 6 hours and stopped to hack down banana trees to get the middle out to cook up for our dinner. It was really fun and she showed us how to make bags to carry stuff using the banana leaves. We then hacked down bamboo to get to the shoots, which we'd also use for our dinner.
The walk was really quite difficult with some pretty hard climbs. Eventually, around 5.30pm, we got to the place we stayed on the first night. It was part of the Karen hill tribe but there were no families living there. The people there worked on the rice paddies that were all around us giving a remarkable view. We made dinner which was a mix of some stuff Izz bought from the market and the food we foraged in the jungle. It was really interesting to see all this and to have all of it put together, and the fact it tasted pretty good helped too.
That evening we met one of the Karen tribe members who gave us a gun to play with! It was a very old rifle that had to be loaded with gunpowder and about 10 tiny pellets making it like some really weak powered shotgun! The idea was to go out in the evening for a few hours and see if we could catch anything to eat the next day. We walked around the jungle for about an hour and hadn't seen anything. To be honest I thought the whole thing a bit of a farce since there were 9 of us and the 2 guides making a lot of noise that would surely scare anything away anyway. Then one of the Spanish girls spotted a snake. It was about a foot or so long but really thin and apparently not at all dangerous. I looked at it thought 'what would be the point?' as there wouldn't be any meat on it and there's no way we could actually do anything with it. But Izz told us we would be able to add it to our lunch tomorrow and since we hadn't caught anything we decided to go for it anyway. So we chopped off its head and it took about 10 minutes for the nerve endings to finally give out! It turned out I was right - we were shown how to skin it and the we just barbecued the whole thing and chopped it us to pass around. There was no actual meat on it really. So we carried on in the jungle and by this point it was getting to midnight and we were really tired from a day of walking. Then, right towards the end, Izz spotted the tail of a small bird and instructed us to shoot it! Again, such a small thing wasn't worth killing and I'm not even sure it wasn't set up. I mean the English guy that shot it got it straight away and the next thing we knew the dog was sniffing at the dead bird on the ground. It could have easily been thrown there by one of the guides. No way of knowing though. So we went back with a small bird and a small snake.
The next morning we got up and made some breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs cooked over the fire. It took a while for us to get up and go as we were all so tired from the day before. Just as we were about to set off, the guide who'd taken us in the jungle gave us a dead animal, which was nice of him. He said he'd caught it in a trap overnight. It was like a ferret thing but with a short tail, maybe a polecat? Don't actually know though. Izz put the bleeding mess in her bag and we set off. The walk was even harder on the second day and we walked up to the highest point on the mountain and there was an excellent view of the biggest mountain in Thailand.
On the way up there we got to a stream where we stopped for lunch. We made a fire so we could cook up some vegetables we'd got in the jungle to have with some noodles Izz had brought from the city. It was really cool because we obviously didn't have bowls or pans. Instead we cut down some bamboo and made pots to cook everything in, bowls to eat everything out of and made chopsticks as well! It was so fun and we cooked using the water from the stream next to us. We decided to eat the snake and bird, but that turned out to be a bit stupid. We were going to cook the polecat but in the end Izz just skinned it and cooked it for later on. Eating out of a bamboo bowl was quite difficult but it was really cool, at least until all the flies decided to make an appearance!
We had been so lucky with the weather as well and it only rained a bit in the evenings, which is quite unlikely in the rainy season up a mountain. During the walk in the afternoon we suddenly came upon a couple of elephants that had been waiting for us to trek though the jungle. I did elephant trekking last year in Thailand and it was good but it felt pretty stupid rocking up at an elephant pen and sitting on the back of it while it walked around for an hour that time. But this was completely different. We were in the middle of the jungle and it was actually part of the trek. We were on the elephants for about an hour and then had a hard, steep walk to get to the main village of the Karen tribe. On the way there we got more bamboo and Izz showed us which mushrooms would be safe to eat and have for our dinner. The tribe village we stayed at in the second night was made up of 6 families who kept pigs and water buffalo that they would breed and trade with other villages. It seemed like a really interesting life. All the children were sent to school 6 days a week and we had brought sweets and things to give to them as presents but foolishly we left them in the pickup on the way over! Izz said she would get them back to them soon though.
That night at dinner we had our polecat thing and some mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Also a couple of the families made us some dishes as well including a really good pumpkin leaf soup and some really spicy curry paste. We also had these crisp things dipped in sweet and sour sauce that was really good. We spent most of the night having a few beers, making slingshots, and talking to Izz about life in Thailand and how her job effects her and her family. It was really interesting and she really wanted to learn about how life is different at home. I nearly forgot to mention our two companions: Steve and Geoff. They were two dogs who met us in the place we stayed at in the first night. They followed us the rest of the way so we gave them names, which Izz found really funny because the Karen tribesmen don't name their dogs.
On the third day Izz took us fishing. We had these small round nets to catch small fish but it didn't really work and no one was very interested as we were all so tired. But Izz also started catching grasshoppers and other insects and showing us how to burn them and eat them. It was really cool and actually tasted quite nice. We had a 2 hour walk to the place where we went rafting. Again, I did the bamboo rafting last year but this was so much better. We raced along the river and got stuck a few times. The water was quite disgusting though. At the end of the rafting we got to a large village where a lot of people who work in Chiang Mai live. From there we got back in a pickup and were taken to the largest waterfall in Chaing Mai, the Mae Pae Waterfall. The waterfall was huge, some 100 meters high, over a few tiers. The water was really cold but very deep and there was a great spot to dive into. The waterfall was so powerful there was no way you could stand underneath it. After that we got back in the pickup to go home and everyone conked out. It took about 2 hours to get back from there and once we got back we were all so glad to have hot showers and sleep in a comfy bed!
It was definitely one of the best things I have done since coming away and it's something I think everyone (fit enough) who comes to Thailand should experience. In Chiang Mai the more popular (and cheaper) treks are the touristic ones which sound a lot like what I did last year. And although this one was three times the price it didn't matter because it was a hundred times better. We had a day to chill out a bit and have a massage but had to catch a bus that evening to get out of Thailand since our visa was due to expire. So we've caught a bus to Laos and gone up to Vang Vieng.
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