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So after our pretty tough 13 hour buggary of a train ride we finally arrived in Chiang Mai. We had one nights stay at a guest house full of bed bugs before we started our 2 day jungle experience in the jungle. We were introduced to our tour guide and group. This was a nice bunch and we were the only English people which was a pleasant surprise. We had a short journey before we checked out the local markets and then started our elephant hike. This was awesome as i got to ride with the elephants head between my legs, though at times it was a bit unnerving as it was very off of balance at times. After the ride we got back in the car for a short drive before we began to hike to a nearby waterfall. When we got there we went for a swim and climbed the waterfal. At the top, just waiting for a photo to be taken i almost fell off nearly hurting myself pretty badly...oh well! We dried off and began out hike to the ethnic village that we would be staying in that night. When we got there we stayed in a large wooden hut on tiny sheets laid on the floor. We were cooked some nice Thai food which consisted of a large snake egg! After a good nights sleep, which i hadnt had in a very long time, we split off from our group and joined another group because we unlike our original group were only doing a 2 day trek. We joined a tour of English guys and we completed our trekking. To finish our little tour we did some bamboo rafting, which is exactly how it sounds. 5 or 6 large bamboo strapped together, 3 people or in our case 4 as we had a little girl guiding the raft down the rapids. However, although she told us to sit down we were having none of it and surfed our way down. This didnt help as we kept on hitting rocks and going flying into the water! After all getting wet we didnt care anymore so started rugby tackling each other off the raft onto shallow rocks, lots of fun! This pissed the irascible little girl off even more who threw her stick into the water, naturally i realised i had to do something about this so i got the stick and prodded her off the raft! Eventually she saw the fun and joined in!
After getting picked up by our tour guide at the edn we were dropped off at our guest house and stayed one night before we began our passage into Laos. We were picked up the following morning by a minibus which we took to the border of Thailand and Laos. After staying one night here, which at times was pretty wierd because looking off the balcony you could see an entire different country on the other side of the river, we took a two day slow boat down the Mekong River to Lua Pra Bang. The slow boat was pretty cool as the views were awesome but the conditions were very tough. Hard seats, 50cm leg room for 10 hours. The night we had inbetween these rides was nice untill our room slowly started to fill up with moths, this got ridiculous but we slept through it. In the morning we examined the bathroom to find we could barely see the floor under a blanket of dead moths! After this grim night we finished our slow boat down the Mekong to arrive Luang Pra Bang, Laos.
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