i keep a diary

May 05, 2005

Thailand Part Six: The Rest of the Hill Tribe Trek

On to day two of our three-day trek to visit different hill tribes in northern Thailand (just south of the border on Myanmar).

Wednesday, May 4th

After a Tuesday of hiking through torrential rain, we woke up super-early Wednesday morning to a gorgeous, sunny day! (By the way, I always thought that shit about roosters waking people up in the morning was like storybook stuff - but that's the real deal! Those motherfuckers start up as soon as the sun rises and they actually say "cock-a-doodle-doo." I shit you not!)
After some breakfast, we decided to further blow the village kids' minds by showing them how to play...
...frisbee!
After everyone had finished eating and packed up, we set out hiking to our next destination: another hill tribe village that was an entire day's journey away (including a four-hour rafting trip down a river...WHAAAAT?).
Here's us taking a break after the first 90-minute leg of the trip. We felt like athletic superstars all hiking through the jungle at what we figured was an impressive clip. Until we turned around and realized that...
...these three little kids from the village had been hiking along behind us for fun and had not only been keeping up with our pace, but had been doing it barefoot. Hahaha. By the way, is there anything cuter than...
leaf hats
...these two? Hahahaha. Look at his cute little leaf hat! Awwww.
leaf hats
As the jungle got more dense, the mosquitoes and flies started to become a real nuisance. Ever helpful, our guide Rooney once again stopped to make everyone special leaf hats that help keep the bugs out of your face. Here's Sean.
leaf hats
Andy's hat!
leaf hats
Awwww, yeah. Now I'm styling! You may think that we're all being a bunch of pussies by wanting hats to help repel insects, but before you pass judgment, keep in mind that in this particular part of the world, there are insects everywhere that look like...
leaf hats
...THIS! For reals, yo . How scary is this motherfucker? It's an arachnid in the whip-scorpion family called a giant vinegaroon! (Believe it or not, these bad boys also can be found in Texas and other southwestern US states!). As scary looking as it is, it's relatively harmless. Instead of having a poisonous stinger, vinegaroons have a tube coming out of their abdomen that they use to spray an ammonia-vinegar mixture onto their prey to stun them! Once stunned, they use those pincers to rip their prey apart and stuff into their creepy insect maw!
best ˆ vinegaroon
Rooney was brave to pose next to it so you'd have an idea of scale. Pretty creepy, right?
vinegaroon
After another 90-minutes of hiking, we reached the river we'd be rafting down in order to reach the next hill tribe. Here's one of the guys that makes his living constructing bamboo rafts for tourists like us getting ready to help us cross the river on a movable raft-bridge.
bamboo ˆ raft
It was at this point that our little tagalongs bid us farewell and headed back (three hour hike!) back to their village.
leaf hats
The rafting part of the trip was INSANE! I don't have many pics because we had to keep all of our gear in waterproof bags and I was worried about dropping my cam in the river...but I did manage to bust out my cam a few times and snap a few quick pics. Ok, so our entire group divided up to share two, twenty foot bamboo rafts. Instead of oars, everyone was giving a 15-foot long bamboo pole that you used to steer and propel yourself by pushing-off along the bottom of the river. (Waaaaay easier said than done).
This part of the trip was EXHAUSTING, but so much fun. The river's current was pretty strong and so we had to spend three straight hours being vigilant and working as a team to make sure our raft was thrown into rocks. The rafts are pretty much indestructible, so if get thrown into rocks, pretty much the worst thing that can happen is you get thrown off the raft and fall into the river. Here's a pic I took from the back of the baggage raft during one of the few calm parts of the river where we could relax for a few minutes and just sort of drift.
Every once in a while, we come to a part of the river that was filled with water buffalo and everyone would have to smack their bamboo sticks against that water (which is really loud!) to scare them away.
Hahahah. Look at them all like "WTF?"
Rooney keeping a watchful eye on them.
After another solid two hours of rafting, plus another 45 minutes of walking (in soaking wet clothes!) after abandoning our rafts, we finally reached the hill tribe village. The second village was a lot less exciting than the first. It seemed like the villagers there had been hosting tourists for a lot longer than the first tribe we'd visited so they were a lot less interested in trying to mix with us or hang out with us. They pretty much just greeted us, showed us to a big lodge that was set apart from their village, and then left us alone.
We all changed into dry clothes and hung out while Rooney and a few others walked 45 minutes outside of the village to a market to pick up some ingredients for dinner and some beers for later that night. When they got back, Rooney took all the ingredients they'd scored and cooked us another awesome meal.
After dinner, all of the women came over from the village and set up blankets to sell all sorts of necklaces and clothes they'd made.
After dinner, we hung out, drank some beers and Rooney entertained us with all sorts of...
...matchstick puzzles! Some of them were so difficult!
Chris, Andy and Sean trying to solve the cow puzzle. So I just realized that up until this point I've neglected to mention that Rooney, our guide, was FLAAAAAMINGLY GAAAAAAAY in a really flamboyant, overly dramatic way. He literally couldn't go two minutes without making a suggestive remark to one of the guys on the trip (which was pretty funny because at least three of the guys on the trip were pretty clearly homophobic and were getting progressively more and more uncomfortable). So after Rooney had run out of matchstick puzzles, he announced that it was time for his...
...LADYBOY SHOW! Yes! He disappeared into the lodge and returned wearing this totally budget "drag costume," then proceeded to perform a slew of songs by...
...Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Rooney, just so you know, I think you're beautiful. No matter what they say, remember, words can't bring you down!

Thursday, May 5th

The next morning we got up at the buttcrack of dawn again (Damn you, roosters!)...
...and set out on a several hour hike to explore a nearby cave, our final tourist destination before meeting up with our ride and heading back to Chiang Mai. Hey, look! More water cows!
After a couple of hours, we reached a lodge at the foot of a mountain where we dropped off all of our bags. We then hiked to the top of the mountain...
...and entered the mouth of the cave.
The cave started off pretty mellow and I was kind of bummed because it seemed like it was going to be some lame, touristy trap kind of deal. But a few minutes in, we actually had to start doing some moderate climbing and squeezing through cracks, and it became apparent that we were actually inside a pretty sizable cave!
Since we'd started towards the top of the mountain, we spent a lot of time climbing down.
One of the big rooms very deep inside.
During a few of the really steep parts, there were ladders set up to help you get down. At this point, we were like 90 minutes into the mountain and it was so crazy quiet and dark. When everyone turned off their headlamps, you literally couldn't see your hand when it was one inch in front of your face.
Later on, things suddenly got not-so-quiet. Because there were thousands of bats alerted to our intruder-presence, making noise. I managed to snap this pic of this sleepy lil' critter.
bats ˆ cave
Almost two and a half hours after we'd entered the cave, we finally made it all the way through to the opening at the bottom of the mountain. Daylight!
Afterwards, we hiked back to lodge where we'd dropped our bags off and Rooney cooked us yet another awesome, homemade meal.
Mmmmm. Deliciously, peanutty, noodley, cabbagey thingy.
After lunch we slung our backs back on and set out on our final hike to meet the songthaew that would be picking us up and taking us on the long drive back to Chiang Mai. The ride back was SCARY AS FUCK. It's hard to tell from this photo, but the roads we were traveling on were sloped like 35 degrees downhill and our driver has flying down them at like 45-50 MPH. (Keep in mind, we're sitting in the back on hardwood benches with no seatbelts! My ass still hurts. Er, because of the ride in the pick up truck...just wanted to clarify.)
Here's a shot of the mountain we'd ridden down in the back of the songthaew.
Two hours into the drive back, our driver finally pulled over so we could pee, grab a snack and try to recover from motion sickness.
Andy trying to recover.
Another hour or so later and we made it back to the Libra Guest House in one piece! Here's the final pic of our group before we disbanded for a much needed hot-water shower! Clockwise from top-left: Sean, Tom, Chris, Jon, me, Rooney, German Girl Whose Name I don't Remember, Her German Boyfriend Who Name I also can't Remember and Andy.
Yay! Thanks for being the best tour guide ever, Rooney! Seriously, if anyone reading this is going to be visiting Chiang Mai, I highly recommend the Libra Guest House and their treks!
After hot showers and naps, our entire group (minus the German couple who sort of kept to themselves for our trip) decided to meet up and hit the town in search of KARAOKE! The six of us hailed a tuk tuk and piled in! I know what you're thinking...six of you? But I only count five! Well that's because you forgot to count...
....Andy who spent the entire ride hanging off of the back of the tuk tuk! Which seemed like a really fun thing to do until....
...our tuk tuk blew a tire while doing 40 MPH and poor Andy was almost thrown into traffic as our driver struggled not to flip the suddenly two-wheeled vehicle. Tom points out the damage after our driver finally managed to pull over.
Our driver (and his magical whistle!?). Thanks for not killing Andy! Our driver was bumming about his flat, so we offered to hang out with him until he got it squared away. After 20 minutes or so, he realized he wasn't going to be able to fix it and flagged down a passing songthaew for us. He explained to our new driver (who didn't speak much English) that we were good guys and that we were looking for "karaoke fun."
Here we are in our much roomier (and with four wheels!) songthaew. We were looking for a normal karaoke bar, but something must've gotten lost in translation because our new driver ended up taking us to a karaoke hooker bar! I shit you not! We walked in and it was a theater full of guys sitting at tables watching scantily clad girls sing karaoke songs on stage! We didn't fully understand what was happening until we asked for the "sign up sheet," and realized that the clipboard we were handed was so that we could write down the name of the girl we wanted to pay to have sex with, instead of writing down the name of the song we wanted to sing. Whoopsie!
So we headed back out into the parking lot to see if we could find a driver that could help us find a non-hooker karaoke bar. We ended up finding just the dude and squeezed into his even-tinier tuk tuk. Jon sat up front practically on the driver's lap...
...while Chris, Andy and me shared the back and Tom and Sean decided to hang off the back!
Hahahah.
The place our driver ended up taking us to was way the fuck outside of town in the middle of nowhere. Just when we were beginning to worry that something shady was afoot, we arrived! The place was a cavernous, communal karaoke bar with one giant video screen with only a handful of patrons. Our hostess seated us right in front of the screen and explained that karaoke was free, but we'd have to buy at least one bottle of booze and several bottles of mixers. This majorly bummed us out...at least until we looked at the price list and realized that this would cost us about $6 each.
Our booze and mixers showed up and we decided to crack the karaoke tome and start signing up for songs. Too bad we should've checked the book first! 95% of the songs were in Thai - and the few that were in English were pretty obscure. Regardless, we vowed to sing at least one song each, watch everyone else sing Thai karaoke, and finish THE BOTTLE! About 45 minutes later, when we were only about two-thirds of the way through our bottle, we were informed that the bar was closing down. We got up to leave and the manager kindly reminded us that we were more than welcome to take our unfinished bottle with us! Woooo!
We piled into a new tuk-tuk and agreed that we had to try to finish the bottle before our new driver got us home. Chris starts us off!
Hahaha. Tom up front with our driver, totally wasted.
But probably not as drunk as Jon and Sean who decided to hang off of the back of the tuk-tuk...
...and only holding on with one hand so that they could help finish the whiskey. Hahahaha.
So. Drunk.
This is probably my favorite picture from the night. In fact, I think the face that Chris is making merits....
...a close up! Hahahahaha.
We told our driver that we were hungry and he told us that he know "just the place." He dropped us off at some 24-hour fast food place right around the corner from Libra Guest House that specialized in burgers! None of us had had any type of western food in almost a month, so we figured we'd give it a shot.
Hahaha. Check out Jon's "drunk and waiting for fast food" face.
We had to wait a good twenty minutes or so, but the food was well worth the wait! After eating, we all said farewell, disclosed future travel plans, exchanged emails, agreed to try to meet up sometime in the future, and then headed our separate ways!