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Date Posted: 20:17:56 03/07/03 Fri
Author: Sarah
Subject: Jungle Trekking

Hello everyone! Me and Nomi finally went on a jungle trek the other day! Our guesthouse(like all guest houses in Chiang Mai) was really pushing for us to go on a jungle trek with thier company. We didn't know if we should go or not because all of the treks went to visit a hill tribe village, and this can be very damaging to the hill tribe people and thier culture.

we finally decided to do a two day trek that only went to one hill tribe because we wanted to experience jungle trekking at least once while in Thailand. We ended up going with two middle aged couples, both of them from Canada, who had been travelling around Asia for a couple of months now. They were all very nice people, and in good physical shape so we kept a pretty good pace going on our trek. We started out by going on a 1 1/2 gour elephant ride through the forest. This was probably our least favorite part of the trek, the seats on the elephants were very very uncomfortable and we felt sorry for the elephants. One nice thing about riding the elephant however was that it helped to keep us cool. For part of the time,the elephant was walking through water, and she kept on filling her trunk with water and then spraying her back. This is what elephants normally do to cool themselves off, be we happened to be on the elephants back at the time, so we got rather wet.
After the elephant ride we went on a 2 hour mostly uphill hike throught the forest to the hilltribes village. It was absolutely beautiful hiking through the forest, the sunlight made everything look a lovely greeny-gold colour, and the animals and insects in the forest sounded so neat. We heard plenty of insects on the trek, but luckily enough they seemed to want to leave us alone. Even Naomi recieved very few insect bites. I got a few red ant bites, but other then that we were fine(although the red ants over here are as big as small spiders and bite pretty hard).
The hilltribe village was really interesting. It was a small village,home to about 9 families, but it was a very happy and pleasant place to be. Everyone seemed so healthy and content. Without t.v or computers, the children were so healthy running around playing tag and other sports. I would love to spend a couple of weeks in a place like that, it would be a very relaxing vacation. The only thing I didn't like was the way all the children ran over when we arriived and immediately started trying to sell us souvinears(bead necklaces, bracelets, that sort of thing). They were being very persistant but we didn't want to buy from any of them because it wouldn't have seemed fair to buy just from one and not the others.
The next day we walked down do a stream and went for a swim(we were told before we left that we shouldn't go swimming in freshwater, but the current was so strong from the waterfall, and so many people were swimming, we decided it would be ok). We'd been dying to swim since we arrived in this hot part of the world, so we enjoyed it very much.
The last part of our trek was a 1 hour bamboo rafting trip. This was probably my favorite part of the trek. It was very relaxing to be floating along the river. Because the water level was so low, the water was moving fairly quickly, and there were quite a few rocks sticking out of the water. Every once and a while we'd hit one of these rocks, and then we'd have to hang on for dear life because the jolt was almost enough to throw you off. This part of the rafting trip was a little less relaxing, but we enjoyed it none the less.
Overall the jungle trek was a very good experience.
I'd better go now, i'm probably racking up quite a bill at this internet cafe. Talk to you soon!
Sarah

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