Thai treking...

Well hello there folks, i have returned in one piece to blog once more following our 3-day trekking experience! Had an absolutely amazing time and would recommend it to anyone if you're up for roughing it a bit, well a lot actually! There were 13 people in our group from a variety of nationalities, so it was a great way to meet people. We started out with some elephant treking which i was really excited about cos i love elephants and it was good because you got to ride on their back around a bit of the jungle and cross rivers. However it was sad for me to see the elephants tied up and you know they aren't treated the best by the handlers. I guess it never really matches up to seeing elephants in the wild but im sure i will get to do that someday!

We left the elephant park to begin treking and it started to rain. Now for those of you who don't know, its rainy season here in Thailand at the moment so this was torrential rain - ive never seen anything like it, streets were quickly turned to rivers. At this stage we were just travelling to our starting point and because there was not enough room for us all inside the van, stefan and i and a couple of others were sitting in the roof rack. We quickly had to stop the van and take a bit of shelter - we were soaked through! Luckily we had bought wee ponchos before we left for about 30p and im so glad we did because we had really heavy showers everday that lasted maybe 2-3 hours. It didn't spoil it though because it wasnt cold, just wet!

Each night we wuld stay with one of the indigenous tribal villages where we would have a meal cooked for us and then a night of singing and chatting around candlelight! The next day was more trekking, some waterfalls and more rain of course. Stefan had bought some cheap sandals from the market to wear trekking so he wouldn't wreck his good trainers. We were walking through a lot of mud this day and within about 10 minutes both of his sandals ripped so that all that was left was the bit over the toes - flippin hilarious to watch him trying to go downhill!!! He had no other footwear with him so we had to laugh! That night the village children put on a little singing and dancing performance for us which was lovely. You would think that sleeping in a jungle village would be so peaceful, no traffic or city noise but lo and behold we were awoken by a chorus of rooster 'cock-a-doodle-dooing' from about 5am each day. I mean it was still dark which i couldn't understand but after about 4 hours of it you were about ready to strangle something. If it wasn't the roosters then it was dogs fighting!

On the last day we trekked to the white-water rafting place on the Mae Taeng River. We were told we had picked the best day of the year because there had been so much rain, the rapids were better. It was awesome, lots of grade 5 rapids which was so much fun - great way to finish the adventure!

Tomorrow morning we fly to Ko Samui island and we will spend until Friday horizontal on the beach! Here's hoping they aint getting the same rain we are getting in Northern Thailand!

Can't seem to get any pics up here at the moment (grrrrr) but i'll try again later!