Jungle Trek Days 2&3 - 14th & 15th September 2007

After the first day’s trekking I was ready for almost anything.  Well at least I was trying to prepare myself for almost anything, I won’t quite say I was definitely READY for it.  As it turned out though all was pretty cruisey after that first day.

Seems the first day was such a killer because we had to trek UP the mountain.  After that is was mostly some traversing about with a little up and down thrown in, but nothing like that first day.  Which is good because if it had of been I might have been even more incapacitated than I was on returning to Chang Mai, but more on that later.

Second day was some trekking about to another (much smaller) village, a couple waterfalls and that was about it really.  Piece of piss.  That night we stayed in a jungle camp next to a swift flowing creek just a short way from a nice big waterfall.  Match stick games and groan worthy attempts to play the guitar were off the menu that afternoon and night when first off all the hill tribe folks broke out the sling shots and later on the decks of cards appeared.  After a few dabbles in different card games we settled into round after round of the fore-mentioned asshole, many beers were consumed by all, the asshole hat grew and grew (don’t ask) and a good time was enjoyed by all.

One thing that I thought was pretty cool in this camp was their plumbing setup.  They had a couple constantly running showers that were created by strategically placed bamboo pipes that fed from the river further upstream.  Here’s a lesson though: strategically placed they may be, firmly placed though is another story.  Jake decided to throw some clothes over the last section of the ‘pipes’ feeding one of the showers and managed to take the whole thing out.  A bunch of us then jumped to the rescue in trying to repair the section but after some failed attempts, worried looks and shoos away from the hill tribe ladies in residence we decided to leave it to the professionals.  I think if anything our attempts to fix it were only making matters worse.  In any case here’s a few shots of the setup (before Jake got to it):

 

 

 

 

The next day it was another late start (which was probably a good thing considering the amount of empty beer bottles in the trash that morning) and after a leisurely stroll and a very cool river crossing on a very long log we were at the last section of the journey.  The white water rafting.  Bags went into the truck that was waiting, we split up into two groups got about 5 mins of instruction and into the rafts we went.  For those that know about this sort of thing I was told it was level 4 rapids.  For those to whom that means nothing, well, it was fun.  There was some very cool sections where we got thrown about quite a bit & we all got totally drenched.  On the whole though I did think the fun sections could have been a little longer.  Still I wont complain as it was about 10000% more fun than the last “white water rafting” trip I went on a few years back in Aus, back then about the one white water I saw that day was when I took a piss that morning…

Anyways I don’t have any shots of the white water rafting or the bamboo rafting that followed, as the camera gear was off in the truck so I’ll leave you with a shot of that awesome river crossing on the long fallen over log.  Let me add that a slip here was a drop of several meters into a stream strewn with boulders - it wouldn’t have been pretty…

 

Comments

[Celine]

Just a note to all: Ben's alive and well...so no worries, he's just being a slacker as usual and not updating his blog.

[Ben Heys]

Hah, yep, slack is I