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Sorry its taken so long to get this blog started but we've been spending a few relaxed weeks on Koh Chang catching up on ourselves at last, but thats all another story yet to come.
Last we spoke we were in Chaing Mai recovering from our first jungle treck having absolutely loved it. While discussing where next to go I mentioned that I wouldn't mind another few days of trecking maybee just in a different location. Rob knew exactly where to go ... off to Pai. So we headed yet further north in to the golden triangle on a 4 hour mini bus ride on some rollercoaster like roads up in to the mountins and finally arrived in Pai. Classicly for us it was beltingly hot when we arrived and strangely so too, we examined a few guest houses for the best deal as usual and managed to find no where to stay before an almighty thunderstorm ensued. We were still so exhausted from the last few days and the raining went on soooo long that while sitting in a bakery eating pies (in Pai!!!) we decided to opt for the cheap and vaguely cheerful option directly over the road just so we could go to sleep.
Pai itself turns out to be a strange little town, very small with not much to do, each street looks the same as the last and I found my bearings very hard to find here. The travellers here look like real travellers, a little bit grubby and smeling of patchouli oil, wearing hessian sack clothing and dread locks. This has to be the only place in he world where it is Ok for middle aged men to wear flowery pants and headbands in their long unwashed hair!!! Anyway we came here to go trecking didn't we?
As we do we shopped around for the best deal for a trecking package, one guys selling point was that he knew exactly where to find pot in the mounains while we are on the treck! Anothers was I think that he personally would come wih us and he would teach us some jungle survival techniques, or a least thats what we think he said but he was so hard to understand that we elected to give it a miss. Finally we found two shops side by side who could take us trekking for two days followed by two days of river rafting, perfect how exciting. The first was more costly than we would have liked however he talked the talk of a most excellent adventure. The seconds selling points where that his neigbours were unsafe had poor equipment and "no one ever died on one of my trips!", he bothered us a little as he spent more time b****ing about next door than trying to sell us his trip, so we decided to go wih next door. We booked for two days later as our clothes were still being cleaned from the last trip.
Trekking day 1:
Early start, we met a chap called Les from sommerset who spoke a bit like that, and the three of us were driven in to the mountains by an asian Dustin Hoffman (gutted I didnt get his pic) to meat our guide Tep. Tep at first struck me as a quiet unassuming guy whom from my first instinct was not able to speak much English. I was wrong his english was practically perfect and he was just weighing us up before he let his guard down. Unlike the treck in Chaing Mai Tep said from the very start take your time there is no rush, thank got I thought as the uphill pace last time near killed me, never bothers Rob though I think maybee hes an alien or something, certainly super human. As we started uphill on the treck we were passed by lots of hill tribe children, whom apparently live in the village in the mountain at weekends and during the week they live in their school in town, and as education is free for all in Thailand they all go. The only thing we found hard to uderstand is after recieving said free education the children at a certain age are expected to live in the village and work as farmers - seemed like a bt of a waste really.
After a steady up hill climb we reached a village, a fairly new one most of the people have only been there for around 6months since they came over from Burma. We had lunch in the village, Tep had been carrying it in his bag, veggie fried Rice, cucumber and lychees, yummy. We were each presented with a plastic bag of rice that was hot!! I questioned Tep as to why its possible for the rice to be hot, "because it was only made this morning" he replied, totaly bizzare. SE Asia have the most amazing plastic bags, they keep food hot, and are used for take away food, even liquids like soup and they dont leak. When a fridge isn't an option a plastic bag will be filled with ice and the drink poured into the bag - crazy, but it works.
After lunch the walk was not as tireing as before and we were faced with some prettry awesome scenery. Mountain side vegetable patches, villages then thick bamboo forest, followed by rocky hillside and cliffs, muddy slippy paths under the damp canopy with long grass, it was all so different. We soon realised that our mosquito spray was not too effective and that if we stopped for any length of time we were swarmed, so we tried to keep moving as much as we could. Finally we arived in a Lahu village where Rob and I would spend the night and Les would go home from. The village was quite large and new, only five years old or so, most of the houses were built on concrete foundations.
We had said our fairwells to les and decided to investergate the village, we wandered through to the "main square" where we watched some children playing jump rope, which was cute, as we stood watching a woman came over to us and told us to follow her, we thought "another india julie, awesome!" she led us to her stilt house with its kitchen in the middle of the hut and her eldely father in one corner, she motioned for us to sit, so we did, she then sat down with us and produced three giant bags of mass produced tatt and told us" hand made, my baby no papa" over and over, what a jipp we thought free tea and an insite to village life and she thought "show me the money!" Beating a hastey retreat to the "safety" (there was a young dog that barked every time it saw us) of our camp for the night, as we arrived back it had started to rain, the perfect time for a shower as it was a giant bucket of water outside raised up on a couple of planks, that poor heathers legs discovered weren't nailed to the supports they rested on. Heather stood on the end of one of the planks that then shot up in the air dumping her on to the floor, with a brave face and the local kids howling with laughter she smiled then washed the mud and grim of the day off. After reciving some treatment and taking pics of her leg, we went up stairs for tea (dinner, all depends where your from!) which was very nice and far to much just for two people, we sat and watched our guide and his mate play cribbage for about an hour, before we got board and left. We sat down stairs drinking whiskey, watching fireflys and marvalling at the moon and the stars, we must have been down there for a good hour before or guide remembered he was getting paid to look after us and not doss off with his mates, so he told us to come up for coffe and he would teach us a card game called as on second thoughts it was a card game. After several games and a couple of cups of coffe we called it a night, we trundled down stairs to our private dorm (the hut was big enough to sleep twenty) and get a good night sleep, which was imposible with the little dog standing outside the door barking till rob chased it away, then every other dog in the village getting into a comp with each other of who9 can bark the loudest and longest, followed by the squeeling pigs and the c*** crowing when the sun came up we must have managed three hours sleep, and thats if we were lucky. Breakfast was scrambled eggs and toast then off we set for the "off road jungle tour.
When we started by climbing a fairly steep hill on our own (tep had disapeared) we started to wounder what we were in for. Tep appeared out of the trees and told us it got much steeper and we were walking too slowly! Reaching the top of the much steeper hill we had a fantastic view over the valley in which the village lay, on the way up the hill we seen male dung beatles rolling there piles of dung up the hill, which was quite cool. The level we had stopped at was actually a road, tep told us this road was built by the locals for the japaneese during WWII, the locals were paid three bhat each per day, the road was to link thailand with burma which we could see from the road, we followed the road for about fourty minutes before tep told us we were to take a short cut, cool a short cut!! or oh crap a short cut!! As we tried to follow our mountain goat down the sheer drops with out falling on our asses, the last thing we needed was him telling us if we kept moving forward instead of trying to go slowly we were less likely to fall over, so run fast down the hill and you will not fall over, probably!
We have to be honest about this part of our trip, we hated it, he led us down loose soil faces that were sixty degrees (may the great sky god strike me down if i lie) on to a river bed that had bamboo traps ( just bamboo that had fallen into our path) that were ready to snagle you, rocks that you could turn your ankles on, rocks that he told you to stand on that couldn't hold the weight of a pigme child never mind a western adult, by the time we reached the river we were battered bruised and knackered, where insult was added to injury "on my own that takes me two hours, its taken us five", this man had no idea how close he came to being drowned in that river, which we had to wade through several times before he told us his village was just round the corner, a very long and winding corner but any way, as we entered the "village" every dog went mental, not just barking but bouncing up and down barking like they could see diner had just walked into town. The walk through the village was only made more scary as two dogs ran at us teeth out barking like rabid killing machines, and tep legged it, ( what we didn't see was him pick up two stones, as the dogs chased him he spun round and hit both dogs with the two stones).
Tep had four hunting dogs! We were staying at teps house! Three of the dogs acepted us but manhoo didnt, evey time we went any where he would bark, which would bring the other three running and barking, not cool. Tep told us hev would share a room with his sister and i would have my own room, we laughed, his wife clearly didnt know we were coming, she didnt laugh, nor did we when after a very tense thirty minutes we were shown the two seperate beds where they thought we would be staying.Have you ever tryed to say "not on your life pall" but with out upsetting the person your talking to?? have you evry tried when the person your talking to is not from the same language you are, trust me it aint easy but after another tense thirty minutes we had it sorted, one big bed two married people , sister next door in the single bed! That evening after a meal of rice and tinned sardines in tomato sause (a special treat just for us) we sat drinking whiskey watching kung foo panda in thai with all the family, slightly odd but very cool.
After another night of limited sleep and another breakie of eggs and toast we crossed the main road outside teps house to meet up with the rest of the tour group who would be doing the rafting two days with us. There were a group of spanish going hiking and meeting us at camp that night and three english guys named nathan, richard and alex who with us , tep and an awesome guy callred manhoo would be taking the rafts and supplies to camp via the river.We had a great relaxing day floating down the river not white water but still a pleasant day bobbing along, draging the raft over a fallen tree, stopping at a waterfall for lunch(dinner, depends where your from!) and a swim, just a realy nice day, every time we asked manhoo what somthing was he would tell us then say "taste good on bar b q" how there are any animals or birds left i dont know, tep dived from his boat because he saw a big lizzard he was trying to catch, and no doubt bar b q if he had caught it! We mored up the boats at camp, unloaded all the supplies, bagsied the best beds and drank some rice whiskey with tep , allan, richard, nathan and alex (allen is anothe guide who had taken richard and alex trecking the day before), tep then took us off to tiger cave, no tigers but the chance of a cobra, is what we were told, by the time we got there hev knew it was a mistake to have come, but she didnt want to sit in camp on her own, but wasn't going in to the cave, which ment she was in the jungle on her own, after ten minutes of being in the cave which was so tight i somtimes woundered if i would make it through, i decided i was going back, so the boys surged on and i crawled through darkness on my own back to where we had left hev, she was relived to see me and i was revived to see no tigers had tried to eat her, we sat for ten minutes chating waiting for the boys to return from the cave, when they appeared we were all covered in mud from crawling through the cave and decided a swimm was in order, by the time we got to camp the spanish had arravied and were in the river, so we joined them, after another fantastic meal we settled in for the evening with some drinks and a couple of games of cards.
The breakie was to be scrambled eggs and toast again, but i had asked tep for fried eggs as a joke the day before, and to our great suprise, hev and i were served fried eggs whilst everyone else ate scrambled, for the days white water we were to be split, the spanish (which consisted of three spanish lads an argentinian guy and two german girls) in one boat, with tep at the helm, and nathan hev and i plus one of the girls wityh allen at the helm in the other boat, alex and richard were in a dukie( two man inflatable kayak).
From the word go the spanish had to be in the lead they simply had more power on the flat still water, we bounced over a few rapids, that were warm up rapids to get you used to the boat and work as a team, which our boat did very well, not so in the other boat, we also started splashing each others boats with is much easier when your in front, when we got along side there boat i gripped the closest person and pulled him out of his boat, he freaked out and grazed his shoulder on the under side of the boat, i was then pulled out of our boat by my life jacket, alls fair in love and war. We stopped at some hot springs for a splash in the hot mud where i tried to apologise, it was only the argie id dunked, he was pissed and turned away as i tried to say i was sorry. We sat on a rock and talked to manhoo who offered us tea that he had brewed using the spings to heat his water, one of the spanish guys known as "mr naked guy" lived up to his name covering himself from head to toe in mud, after twenty minutes of playing in the mud we were all back in the boats and heading for dinner, by the time we stopped for dinner, tep was fed up with his crew, telling us the were lazy and not doing what he told them to, allen laughed as we were a tight team, after dinner we went onto the big rapids still with the spanish chanting pro spain anti english songs (all in good nature), we got the drop on them and took the lead through the first big rapid, which we coasted through, the spanish went for a swim, we sang rule britania, it seemjed apropriate some how, the spanish have always had a problem with waves when in boats.The next couple of sets the spanish.
Tep had gone for a swim along with his crew, and demanded that he and allen swap boats, he could take no more, allen wasn't happy but agreed, he managed to stay in the boat but again the crew went for a swim, by the time we had passed the rapids the spanish had stopped singing and we had just about stopped gloating, there was just enough time left in the day to go for a swim down the river. As we were aproaching the end of the boat trip tep told us manhoos story, he was a deserter from the army, he didnt like it so went awol in the jungle, changed his name and has never looked back, hes been on the run for more than twenty years, the guy is a legend! We finished rafting loaded all our gear in to a pick up that had taken us out in the first place, we then had to wait two hours as the spanish went elephant trecking, we tried to lit fires with flint and tinder, tred to fly a kite and tried bitter mango and salt, our lift turned up and we pilled in the front leaving the spanish in the back, two hours of air con back to town, bliss, half way back we stopped for drinks, where mr lazy offered to swap with one of us, we all smiled and declined his offer.
That night in town nathan, richard alex hev and i met up for a bite to eat and a drink or two, after some very random convesations and a little to much beer, we bode them fair well as we were to be heading off to sukhothai in the next day or so, nathan was waiting for his thai mate to bring him his passport and money before going back to chang mai, and richard and alex were going further north to see some caves, after a couple of intresting days we were to be on the road again. which ill tell you about next time
till then
"theres no reason to be alarmed, and we hope you all enjoy the rest of your flight, oh by they way is there any one on board who knows how to fly a plane"
all our love the shoe string two
xoxo
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