YOLO - Trekking in Chiang Mai

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We have fallen in love with the moat surrounded town of Chiang Mai. This old style town with beautiful architecture, a slower pace of living and slightly cooler temperatures is the perfect place to put your feet up for a day before delving into some adventure tourism.

Josh recommended our fantastic guesthouse, Libra. We paid 250 baht a night for our fan double room with a cold shower and have been paying a further 70 baht a day each for a delectable continental breakfast of fruit, toast and coffee. 

Josh enjoying his breakfast at Libra

Libra organised our overnight trek in the National Park. We travelled with Rory and Nate from Northern Ireland, Emma and Paul from Ireland, Iris and Tessa from the Netherlands and Dave from England. Our guide Nu is a local of the Karen village, one of the seven villages located on the National Park. His family has been living on the land for the past 80 years. Below is a video of a Karen villager sharpening a knife on a rock.

On our first day we visited a beautiful waterfall, saw some ants dragging a big bug (video below) and went to have a quick soak in the natural hot springs before embarking upon our 5 hour trek.

Nate, me and Sonja in front of the waterfall

For some of our group this was their first experience of tramping... Poor Nate was attacked on the arm and upper thigh by leeches "pretty trippy ay?" The boys slowly got over their complaints through some good natured Kiwi "banter" (or "bunter" as it sounds to us), our accents kept them and Dave laughing for the "reast" of the trip. Little did they know we had our own "fiddly dee potatoes" joke going....

Dave crossing a bridge on our trek

Trekking!!

When we got to camp we had a quick shack shower before a beautiful dinner of various Thai dishes. We then hung out by the camp fire, sang, decorated and set off a lantern before heading to our shack at around 9 to go to sleep. This was when Nate found the leech right up the top of his thigh, it had been chowing down all day, mmm tasty! A pack of random dogs invaded our shack during the night but apart from that and my terrible snoring we were fine.

In the morning we had a beautiful breakfast, bathed and fed the elephants in the river, went elephant riding and bamboo rafting. Nate and Rory were out rowers, Rory kept getting told off got paddling. I got taken out my a tree, it was "pretty hardcase." 

Nate demonstrates below how to get onto an elephant...

Dave and Iris washing the elephants

Paul and Emma on the first elephant, Dave, Iris and Tess on the second elephant

Nate and Rory are on the elephant and the rest of our group are on the bamboo raft

We got home around 4pm back to our hostel, showered, got outer sweaty, sweaty clothes washed (so sweaty) and all met up for some much earned burgers and cocktails.

All and all a fantastic time with awesome people. 

Much recommended. 

Love to all, 

Kim and Sonja