Bangkok and then off to Copenhagen

I flew back to Bangkok from Chiang Mai about noon on Tuesday and went straight from the airport to the hostel and then across the street to my favourite restaurant to have some chicken fried in red curry and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Man, I could come here just for the food!

 

In the evening I went to the Banyan tree sky bar to meet up with Mats and have a couple of drinks. The views from here were great, and the drinks weren’t that bad either! 

Kind of funny as we met up in Singapore, and now in Bangkok as well. Mats were here to spend christmas with his family.

Another really funny coincidence occured the morning after when I went down to have breakfast at the hostel café. In the common room I found Nick, the Australian guy from the trek in Chiang Mai, waiting for his flight back home to Sydney. Bangkok is a pretty big city, so what are the odds of him booking the same hostel as me? Anyhow, it was really fun to catch up a bit! :-)
 

After the usual breakfast, two toast and scrambled eggs accompanied by some great coffee, I went to town to do some christmas shopping.

I also took the last opportunities to get some more of the excellent food in Bangkok. I just love the street food over here! This place which I stumbled across had exclusively local clientele, and it was really close to my hostel.

The staff at the hostel I stayed at must have been the best I ever come across. I wanted to shop for some thai herbs to take home with me so that I can practice what I learned at the cooking class. After helping me writing down what the herbs were called in thai, they came along to the market to help me pick the stuff up! Incredible. I am so glad I found that hostel.

At about ten O’clock in the evening I took the “farang friendly” cab out to the airport and the flight back to Copenhagen. I didn’t look forward to spending 12 hours on a plane, but this was one of the best long haul flights I ever had. I managed to sleep for almost 5 hours and there was noone in the seat next to me, so I had plenty of room. Awesome! :-)

Spending some time in Chiang Mai

After concluding the trek I changed hostel to a nicer one, with a big garden where the houses were laid out in a circle with a common area in the middle with hammocks and chairs.
It was run by a really nice guy who previously worked in the IT business in Bangkok, selling computers and perhipials if I understood him correctly.

On sunday night when we came back, we went to check out the market.
 
They had cut off one of the main streets for traffic and set up stalls with all sorts of things you don’t need. I don’t care much for the things you can buy at these places, but there’s plenty of street food around, and endless possibilities to sample it. Conor, Jeltien and me did our best to pick out the highlights.

On Monday I took the opportunity to chill out a little in the hammocks in the hostel, and eventually Jeltien and me rented a scooter to go around the town and see some of the less travelled roads. I was pretty beat after a cold night in the dorm where I woke up several times freezing under a single blanket. So when driving around, I found myself on the right side of the road a couple of times, which is not the right side in Thailand, that’s the left :-)
We found some nice pad thai place where we had a double portion lunch, and then a quite cool café filled of antique things just by the river. 

In the evening we went to a close by thai restaurant, made out for “farangs”. Meanwhile eating we laid out the plot for the next coming blockbuster “the Hug Academy”.
Apparently the season was right for bananas, so we had to try the special dessert.

Spending the night, and the trek continues

This is what the huts in the village looks like. It was quite a big village with around 150 people according to the guide.


There were quite a lot of kids around, and dogs. They ran around chasing each other on the red & brown colored rock hard dirt.


Here’s one of the dogs guarding the shoes of the villagers, and a photo of one of the enormous flowers from the tree that grew just outside our hut. They were almost as big as handballs.


This is the view from the platform just outside our hut. It was all built on poles as the hill was so steep. Not bad at all :-)


Manuel, a guy from the trek group and me went to have a look around the village while the others were catching their breath, and a couple of beers. It was really cool to experience this, it is hard to convey what it feels like to walk around this village with this great view, sun, and around 25 degrees.


After a while the sun set in the horizon behind the hills, and it got dark in matter of minutes. The colors were amazing, and the sounds from the animals intensified as it got darker.


Our guide and some villagers prepared dinner for us in our bamboo hut and afterwards we built a fire out on the platform in front of it.
You could easily see the stars out there as there was no light that disturbed. We had a couple of beers while our multi talanted guide got out his guitar and sang some songs. In the end one of the village cats fell asleep on my legs, and it was just a perfect wrap up of that day.
Later on a couple of guys from another trekking group joined us around the camp fire, they came from Kalininggrad, pretty cool to have the opportunity to meet someone from there. It was interesting to hear about the life over there in the Russian enclave, cut off from the rest of the country.


After a pretty cold night under damp blankets in the hut, I woke up just in time to watch the sunrise. Amazing, don’t you think?
Just after this we went walking over to the other side of the hill where you could see the milky fog that filled the bottom of the valley slowly drift by.


I found the two cats who visited us in the evening before sleeping on the fireplace, apparently looking to soak up the last heat from the fire. Meanwhile, at this hour the roosters and the chickens had waken up most of the village.


When I came back from the morning walkabout in the village we had a pretty good breakfast preparing us with some energy for the trek down the mountain.


We went trekking again, this time downhill, which was a bit of a challenge to my poor old shoes which had the sole practically completely blank, providing something close to zero friction towards the dry soil.


After skidding and sliding down the steep slippery mountain in my coq sportif’s (which weren’t all that sportif anymore), we arrived at a waterfall. Here we took a dip in the pool created in front of it to get rid of the dust and sweat accumulated during the trek.


A shot down stream in the waterfall. It was easy to get good shots in the water thanks to the waterproof Xperia Active! :-)

   
This is what a natural shower looks like. Manuel to the left tried it out first, to the right you can see me with my hand sticking out.


After drying we went on following the stream down to a where it grew a bit bigger.

Time for some rafting!

We dressed up trying to look our best in life jackets and cool helmets. Honestly I think the helmets wore us as protection rather than the other way around. Anyways, we took off determined to be the first boat reaching the goal.
Armed with plastic paddles and snacks we managed to get down to the base camp, where we started the trek, in style. It wasn’t that crazy a ride, but it was definitly worth it. Especially as it was all included in the 2-day package which ended on 1.100 bath with meals included, a ridiculosly low price if you ask me.

After an “all you can eat” Pad Thai feast at the camp we boarded the truck and went back to Chiang Mai. Tired, but happy! :-)

Trekking to the hill tribes

I went up really early that morning and got an extra bottle of skeeter repellent before we went off in a 4x4 truck with destination the hills north of Chiang Mai. This is where we were to trek around for two days.

We were a mixed group of 10 people which turned out to be great. On these kind of things the group is as important as the actual things you will see and do, so I think I got really lucky this time.

The first stop on our trip was the local market where we got some supplies. And no, the pigs head was not one of them.

About one hour of driving later we got to the base camp, the elephant farm. Here we had lunch: rice with … eh, yes, just rice. That was it. A really low budget meal but luckily it got better later on.

There were two things which were plentiful at this place. Elephants and bananas. Elephants to ride around on, and bananas to feed them with.
 
The banana game went something like this: You start by giving your Elephant a banana, he picks it up with the trunk and realizes “ahaa, these guys have bananas! Sweet!”. And it’s on!
The trunk come back up again “one more please”, if he doesn’t get another one soon enough he blows hard with the trunk and slaps it around and insist, until eventually getting another banana, which get eaten right away. Then the trunk come back up again and it starts over.
If it weren’t for the Mahou (the elephant rider) who knew how to break this endless cycle I think we would have been stuck in the same place until we were all out of bananas. :-)

We were 4 people on our Elephant. Here’s me and Nick from Australia, and in the previous photo you can see Lara from the Netherlands.
One of the funniest things were not to feed your own elephant, but rather to feed one of the other ones. If you threw the bananas in the right places you could get them completely off the track.
Eating so many bananas had its consequences for the animals. We learnt this when the elephant just ahead of us let go of probably the biggest fart I have experienced in my whole life.

As soon as we parked the elephants back at the camp, we started the trek to the hills and the tribe where we were going to spend the night. It lasted for about 3 hours and was mostly uphill. It wasn’t that bad actually, as the air was a bit cooler up here. I am glad I didn’t do this down in Singapore or Indonesia, I would probably have passed out after an hour in the hot humid air :-)

 
We encountered some pretty cool nature on the way up there. This a thing that a type of fleas built on trees. How wierd is that? I stopped for a while and watched the busy traffic of fleas taking off and landing back on the thing. I have to look this up.

The trail we followed was quite steep, but not that hard and didn’t pose too many obstacles. I realized that I didn’t even need my pants which I had put on to protect my legs. This was definitely needed to survive all the scratching and scraping thorn covered plants in the Kaeng Krachan national park I visited a couple of weeks back. I still got some marks on my legs since then.

About half way we made a pause at this small water fall.
A great fig tree, the biggest one I have ever seen, cast its shade over the site and provided a welcome possibility to cool down.

To the left, a bunch of figs, and to the right Nick taking some photos of some really nice colored butterflies.

About three hours and 600 meters of altitude later we arrived at the village of the hilltribe. 
We greeted the villagers with an “Abo aya”, which means hello, good bye, and thanks all in one. Pretty practical, don’t you think?