Welcome to the Jungle!

After a hectic few days in Bangkok and Jenny getting a Thai "massage"; you should see the bruises; we left for Chiang Mai a short 10 hour bus ride to the North.

We were dropped at "Nice Place Guest House" and succumbed to the rain, the early morning and the free accommodation and signed up to their jungle trekking.

This turned out to be one of the best decisions we've made so far.  Here's Jenny being intrepid in the jungle above Pai, near the Burmese and Laos borders!

After a three hour trek through dense jungle and the occasional hill tribe village we arrived at our Ritz by the river...

We stayed with a single family who lived in a raised bamboo hut with a second hut for us to sleep in.  They slept in their hut, us in ours and the pigs, dogs, cats, chickens and cow all slept beneath us.

Here we are cooling off in the local pool after a hard days walking.  The water was suprisingly warm and our guide to the waters can be seen on the left fondling his breasts, suprisingly he was even shorter than Jenny!

Despite how it looks, this isn't war paint.  We played "Black Pancake" games, which involved a forfeit of soot from the cooking pots smeared across your face when you lost at whatever game we happened to be playing at the time.  0-0-7-BANG was the main culprit! Much silliness.

The locals showed us some tricksy puzzles with straw taken from the roof.  Some of them explained by a mental deaf mute called Bai with lots of hand gesturing, and screaming! For this puzzle on the right you must move 2 staws to change this buffallo into 2 buffallo...can you do it?

All of this while the rest of the family were smoking vast amounts of Opium and drinking moonshine behind us!

Please note the candle fire hazard in hut made of bamboo.

This is our trekking group, Didi our guide on the left and Bai 4 from the right.

Here we are on our elephant - honest!  More pictures to follow once we have them emailed by our other trekking mates.

Here's our elephant and her baby just after we'd got off.

Here is a picture of our guide from day two of the trek. After running chaotically through treacherous hills and slopes slippery with recent rainfall, he showed us an enormous spider which he'd found in the undergrowth. He assured us that it was not poisonous, but I wouldnt trust it...shifty eyes!












After this we were taken to a ruver for some bamboo rafting, which was LOADS of fun, albeit precarious - we crashed into the riverbank more than once! We also took a detour through some trees and Matt fell through the boat!!

Unfortunately we couldn't take any pictures of this, for fear of breaking/losing the camera, but hopefully an artisit impression will be with you soon!

All in all our jungle trek was AMAZING!