In the morning, I went wandering around the village, and there didn’t seem to be anybody around. I heard a familiar sound and searched around for its source. I found them – all the girls form then night before and other women and boys were huddled around a black and white TV, watching some dubbed Chinese kung fu/love story movie. Map strikes again!
After breakfast, the elephants arrived. We figured the elephant ride would be pretty cheesy – like cheap circus attractions, but we had a great time. Map went off – we would meet up with him later – and we mounted the elephants from a platform built off of the medicine man’s hut porch. Beth and I were on one elephant, while the other three were on another. We started off, working our way out through the village farms. Our elephant (quite obviously male by casual inspection) was hungry and kept tearing out corn from the fields, only to be hit on the head with a heavy metal pipe by the “driver” – it looked and sounded quite painful! It was amazing how good the elephant’s balance was. Just the day before, Beth and I were slip sliding down the slick mud hill to get to the “showers”, but the elephants handled it with the greatest of ease. River crossings were a bit intense, but again no problems.
After about thirty minutes, we were in the middle of the jungle when abruptly the elephants stopped. The “drivers’ looked at us and immediately I thought “this is where we get robbed”. Horrible to assume something like that, but that’s what happened when you heard too many bad stories/rumors and had a wild imagination. Moments later, the other elephant in front of us took the most enormous piss I’d ever seen and proceeded to shit huge cannonballs all over the place. Who knew?
It took us just over an hour to meet up with Map and banana man on a newly built road. Map said the road was put in three months before, and in six months the surrounding villages would be “electric town”. Some people were happy about it, others were not. The Thai government was trying to integrate the hill tribes into the main population mainly because the tribes were sitting on vast amounts of resource rich land that the government wanted to get at. The North American Indian situation was happening all over again in almost every Asian country we visited.
We’d been lucky with the weather, but just then it started to pour. Beth and I were well equipped, but the other three got soaked. Luckily we were walking on a hard, earthen road and not on the slippery clay paths of the hills. After about half an hour, a truck picked us up and drove us to the rafting jetty.
We had ant filled noodle soup for lunch – we were so hungry that we casually picked the bugs out and continued eating. We laughed – a couple of years before, we would have complained to the waiter and pompously demanded a new meal, and afterward we would have spread the word to family and friends about the restaurant’s cleanliness or lack thereof – OK, I’m exaggerating a bit! Now, we just picked the bugs out and got back to business.
The rafting, although fun, wasn’t the excitement packed adventure that I’d expected. It was the rainy season, yet there were no rapids. Still, sitting (and occasionally poling) on a small raft made of lashed together bamboo poles that barely floated above the surface of the river was pretty good fun. I wouldn’t have been so keen on excitement had I heard the story a woman we met in Nepal who told us about her raft breaking up, killing one of the other rafters and forcing her to hike through the jungle for two days before finding a village that helped her out!
Map wanted to take us to a butterfly and orchid garden, but we vetoed that, so instead he took us to some waterfalls in Doi Suthep National Park. The ten-stage waterfall was pretty nice, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit them.
The Thai people say you haven’t seen Chiang Mai until you’ve seen Doi Suthep pagoda, but we opted to sleep in the next day before our flight to
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