The second installment...

We are now sitting on a slow boat in loas about to depart for Luang Prabang which will take us 2 days and 1 night, but before all that....

My last entry ended with us booked on a jungle trek.

We leave chaing Mai with our guide eggy along with dan and Rachel and start heading west into the jungle. After an hour or so , we stop to pick up nguya, a local guide who speaks few words in English. We drive for another 30 minutes and stop on the side of the road to start our trek. The walking is fairly easy, there are some hard bits up hill and then down where you have to be careful with your footing but overall it's a lot of fun.

After an hour or so we stop at a waterfall for lunch which consists of fried rice and chili oil.. And was fantastic!

We are spending 2 days trekking and spending the night in a local village, after another couple of hours walking, our guide give us an option.. We can stay in the village with the locals and other people doing similar treks, or we can make our way to a camp where we will be the only ones. We decide that the camp is for us, so change our route a little. As we come over the top of a hill, we can see the camp in the valley so start our decent to the river where we are told there will be a bridge. Once at the river side, it quickly becomes clear that any bridge that might have once been here has been washed away.

We look at our guide and he looks at us, we ask where is the bridge?, he looks back and says "we swim" hahahaha.

So after a quick change into our swimmers, we wade accross chest deep water with our packs above our heads and arrive at our camp. There is another guy there sweeping the hut floors and generally tidying up. I ask our guide how long it's been since anyone was here and he tells us at least one year!

Have a look at the pictures, it's right out of a story book.

So we set up camp, light a fire and have a few beers. We play a game of kings to liven things up and are suitably refreshed in no time.

Dinner is cooked for us by eggy and we have a massaman curry as well as sweet and sour chicken with rice. It's amazing how good food can be cooked in the middle of the jungle on a stove that has not been used for over a year, in a hut with no light. Great stuff.

After dinner we have been promised a frog hunt, so dan and I strap on out newly acquired head lights and head off with nguya. For a big lad, nguya moves at lightning speed and soon has a couple of frogs for the BBQ. Eggy also has a couple of grass hoppers to try.

Surprisingly enough the frog tastes like chicken, dan has a go at the grasshopper which has been burnt to near nothing and declares that it is delicious.

We bed down in a wooden hut on mattresses that may as well be made of wood, thee is a mosquito net that covers all four of us and get some rest. We wake in the morning and have a breakfast of fried eggs on toast and then set off for day two.

We are told that we must cross the river again, but further up where there is another bridge.

So we climb a hill, go down the other side and walk along the river to the bridge.

I can see a log one side and a log the other, but no bridge. We look at our guide, he looks at us and says "no bridge" haha.

We have a look around and spot a wier a bit further down so head on over to see if we can cross there. After a bit of testing, our guide makes it over and back and helps us accros. There are 2 parts about 8 feet long that we have to walk as if on a tightrope but with assistance either side, we all make it accros.

Our second day treking is shorter than the first and after 3 hours we are back at the pickup point to meet the driver.

It takes us 20 mins to get to the elephant camp, where we have a 45 minute ride along a track into the jungle and out again. For 20 baht we can buy banans and feed our elephant, which we do.

Then it's back on the pickup truck and a short ride to the river where we board our raft.

It takes us about an hour to get through the small rapids to a place where we stop and jump off the rocks into the water.

Another 10 minutes and we are at the end of our, there is a rope swing that we have a go on and then back into the truck for the ride back to chaing Mai.

While we are waiting to leave, we start talking to some others that are in the truck, a Dutch couple, Reme and Daisy, and a German girl, Lisi. All are intending to head north to pai in the next few days so we agree to travel together to make it cheaper.

As we are all staying at the same guest house. We arrange to meet that night and organize our travel for the next day.

More to come