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?
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