Yesterday we came back from the jungle of Chiang Mai. We went on a 3 day/ 2 night trek and stayed with the tribal villages about 2 hours north of the city. We had a group of about 12 people total and the cool thing was that there were tourists from all over world with us (England, France, Holland, Italy, Canada, Greece). Besides the accents, we all communicated pretty well. At night the villagers cooked us Thai food in these sweet looking treehouses and we all drank and shared stories from our different cultures. There was no electricty and it was pretty crazy to see the way these people live. We hiked about 3-4 hours each day and it was mostly uphill...amazing scenery! We also did elephant riding and bamboo river rafting. Our last night we stayed at a waterfall campsite. It was maybe the sweetest campsite I have ever seen! You could swim in the pool at the bottom, climb up the waterfall and jump into the pool from above. You could also drink beer on the waterfall and it proved to be the one of the best beers I have ever enjoyed.
It felt great to come back from that jungle, we felt extremely dirty from all the activities and the rain. It rains periodically for about 30 minutes to an hour then the sun comes out. It is really humid here and it affected us at first because we would get light-headed, but I think we have adapted to it now. In about 2 hours we have a plane from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and then another plane shortly after from Bangkok to Kao Samui. We are stoked to get out on the beaches! If it is anything like the pictures we have seen we should be in for a great time.
I am going to try to upload some pictures on Picasa (a google program for pictures) as soon as I can. We have some cool ones from the temples of Ayutthaya, and of us petting tigers and going to monkey shows in Chiang Mai. Hopefully everything is going well back at home...this place makes me realize how lucky I am to live there (aside from the tourist aspect of the country). I will write again when we are on one of the islands! I will send the picasa album invite to Mom and Grace, you guys can forward it to everyone else.
Love you all,
Trevor and Brent
