Oh My Buddha! (Day 1)

TREKKING THROUGH THE JUNGLES OF THAILAND: this post cannot begin to capture the epicness.

We got picked up from the guesthouse at 9:45am by a creaky songthaew, we piled into it, then shot off introductions to the three others that were already aboard. The songthaew finished its rounds through Chiang Mai, and we had our complete team assembled.

Introducing, Team Mental: Pedro (Portuguese, resides in Turkey), Brice (French, reminds me of Andrey, has done plenty of traveling), Lara (Swiss, had this amazing, raspy French accent…slight girlcrush, I can’t deny), Flavio (dude was nice but kind of weird, no lie), Ji Seon and Eunkyung (best friends, from Korea), Gary and Jacqueline (awesome European couple…though I initially incorrectly labeled Gary as Eurotrash because he showed up to a jungle trek wearing a collared button-down and preppy pink shorts), Andrew (meh :b), and finally, meeeee.

We drove about half an hour out to a small market to pick up supplies (water, bug spray, etc.), then headed northwest for the mountains. We dumped our packs, and then hopped on elephants. ELEPHANTS. Lum and I actually got seats on an elephant without a safety bar in the front…and the ride is a lot rockier than one would expect. There were a couple times as the elephant was going downhill during which I was clutching onto the sidebars pretty hard. There was some highly-choreographed camera exchanges between pairs on elephants over the course of the ride, so as to ensure everyone would have shots of themselves. The views of the green countryside and valley forest canopies were amazing on elephant-back, though I felt sorry for the beasts at times

While we had been parading around on elephants, our guide, Johnny, had been cooking…we scarfed down a simplistic meal of fried rice, before grabbing walking sticks and commencing a three-hour hike up the mountainside in the stuffy heat.

We had all come into it assuming it was going to be a tough, but still rather tourist-friendly hike. NOPE. We trudged through dense undergrowth, over huge boulders, and hopped random streams, all over a constant, steep incline. Being that it was rainy season, there were areas thick with mud, and one wrong step could easily have sent someone tumbling down the mountain. These were by no means paved paths through the forests; they actually seemed rather untraversed, but that made for an amazing experience. People fell behind once in awhile – Johnny actually laughed at the Eunkyung and Ji Seon because they were struggling and always lagging way behind – “빨리, 빨리,” he’d always shout. I’m disappointed I couldn’t take pictures during the hike, but there was simply no time to whip out my camera, and no one could afford to even tear tear their eyes away from the ground in order to plant his/her feet. It also rained at multiple points throughout our hike, and we were all grimy and soaked by the end.

The reward really did come at the end, when we finally arrived at a tiny remote mountaintop village. There were very few inhabitants (interestingly, all of whom were Burmese, not Thai), and they lived in relative squalor. There was a separate, two-room, wooden hut set aside for our trekking group: one side with sleeping mats and the other side serving as a common area, complete with a firepit. There was even a deck-type installment with an amazing, foggy mountainside view. We were all ecstatic to have arrived.

I came to realize that the village was completely dependent upon tourism as business and income. As the night progressed, we were visited by a woman selling souvenir trinkets, then women offering massages (some of these girls looked to be much younger than I), then children who put on a cute little song and dance performance. For the rest of the night, we all sat by the firepit, drinking, talking, and playing cards. Paying for beers and other drinks was based on the honor system – they had us write our names down and tally up the number of drinks we each had as the night progressed. People in our group got plenty drunk over the course of the night, at 50 baht (~USD 1.70) per beer.