After a more than comfortable bus journey in our beds with televisions and games consoles we arrived in the early morning to Northern Thailand's Chang Mai. Constructing a quick plan we headed out with a lad I knew from New Zealand to explore Chang Mai's temples in the boiling hot sun. We made it to two and after deciding that they all looked pretty similar we did what any group of young men would do if given the chance, hire out motorbikes and become part of the chaos on the roads. We had them for half a day and definitely made the most of them. Cruising and terrorising the streets of Chang Mai on our mopeds, somehow managing to keep hold of our lives. Apart from a few beer stops every hour or so we were pretty much going non-stop for 6 hours. Another one of our intentions that day was to book onto an elephant trek, one of Chang Mai's main attractions, and we did so after stumbling across a travel agency. Two days, one night starting bright and early the next day. So we did the sensible thing and went out and got mildly intoxicated that night, putting us in a great state for our trek the next day. What a grave error that was.
We arrived in the middle of nowhere in a jungle just north of Chang Mai in boiling hot weather. After a quick briefing and a spot of lunch we headed off on our five hour hike through the jungle in 38 degree heat. Yes it is fair to say it was an unpleasant experience that had us questioning what had possessed us to book onto such a trip, were we drunk when we booked it? That evening we eventually arrived at our jungle camp and as you can imagine it was very basic. Constantly reminding ourselves that it was part of the experience we had our wash in the river and a banquet of rice and vegetables for dinner and settled for the evening by the fire. It was a goldmine for mosquitos and unfortunately they have taken a strong liking to the taste of Hyams' blood. We lasted about 20 minutes before giving in and going to bed. Wrapped up in our mosquito nets we prayed that the predators decided to stay away that night.
After a not particularly nice but very long sleep we woke up pretty refreshed the next morning. After not having any issues with animals ourselves in our sleep we were alerted to the fact there had been scorpions bothering some of our group as well as very large flying insects. Happy to get out of the camp we set off for what we believed would be a good day and it was. Kicking off with the elephant encounters, we showered and then rode them around their camp. A really amazing experience that was almost worth the hell we went through with the hike the day before. The rest of the day was a mix of zip-lining, bamboo rafting and white water rafting that had us arrive back at our hotel that night absolutely destroyed. After treating ourselves to a McDonalds feast in bed we went straight to sleep with our plan to leave for Laos the next day. This plan was foiled however as we discovered we had missed the only bus of the day, setting up another night in Chang Mai before we departed in the morning. The evening was spent ambling around the night bazaar where we purchased our second piece of silk clothing each before returning back to the hotel to parade round in our latest purchases. After repacking into my new bag after my original one had finally failed me after four months of heroics, we got to bed reasonably early before our 8am start the next morning, destination: Laos.