Three Great Days

Kira’s post.

Have you ever walked twelve kilometers in one day? Well, I have. On a three-day trek out of Chiang Mai, Thailand. (I walked twelve kilometers on the second day, plus more on the others.)

On the night before we left we had to tell our hotel what we wanted for breakfast because we wouldn’t have enough time to order since our trek started so early the next morning. When I woke up, I had to get dressed very quickly so I would finish my breakfast on time. When my pancake came, I dug in because I was so hungry. I knew I had a long day ahead of me. The truck arrived just as I was finishing it. My parents were a little bit late because they were getting all our bags ready and making sure everything was the way we’d planned. Finally, they came out of the room and into the truck. The night before, our guide had said that we would be sitting in the truck for about an hour and a half to two hours before our first stop, which was an elephant ride. I wasn’t so excited about the elephant ride because I had already had an awesome experience with elephants in Laos. We were riding in a basket, not on the elephant’s neck. I like riding on the neck much better. When we were about half way into the ride, our mahout asked Adam if he wanted to ride on the neck. After a while, I told Adam that I was going to ask the mahout if I could ride on the neck, too. Adam thought the mahout would ask me later so I waited. But the mahout never did. I was disappointed. I didn’t really know how to talk to the mahout anyway because he didn’t speak much English. After about an hour more in the truck we stopped for lunch, which turned out to be fried rice wrapped in a banana leaf, the exact same thing we had on our eighteen-kilometer trek in Laos.

Once we were done with lunch, we got back into the truck and drove to the spot where we were dropped off to start our trek. I think you can tell that the truck ride was pretty long. That day was about 2-3 hours of trekking, about 7-8 kilometers. On the way we saw some huge spiders and lots of dry rice fields. There was too much cool stuff to tell you all of it. When we finally got to the Karen village where we would spend the night, we walked into a small room made of bamboo with mats on the ground and mosquito nets above them. I knew they were our beds because once one of our tour guides brought us to his house in a village and he slept on mats like that. Adam and I called it a five star hotel because you can usually see at least five stars from inside. I changed into my long pants and a warmer shirt. It was kind of cold that night. We all sat by the fire while our dinner was being made. Finally it was ready. It included steamed rice, like almost all dinners have, egg omelets, coconut milk stew with eggplant and chicken with green beans. I finally learned to eat chicken on this trip, but that's the only meat I eat. I ate quickly, but the rest of the trekkers took their time. My dad wasn't feeling well that night so he couldn't stay up and play his guitar like he normally would. I might have stayed up later, but I was feeling very tired so I went to sleep.

In the morning, I was woken up by roosters cockadoodling right under my bed. Oh, I forgot to tell you, almost all houses are on stilts. That's how the roosters were under the room. When I finally was awake enough to get out, I saw some of the other people on the trek out by the fire drinking hot cocoa. I hadn't had that drink for a while so I decided to have some. It was served in bamboo cups. I liked drinking out of them.

After breakfast, which was white bread and jam and scrambled eggs with tomatoes and onions, we began our second day of trekking. That day was 12 km. There were so many hills on that hike! It felt like the trek was going on for about 10 hours or more!

That day we had the same exact lunch – fried rice. I guess that’s just what you have on treks. At our lunch stop there was half a strip of bamboo with water flowing down it and we could go under to cool off. That day was really hot. Well, I guess all days are hot in Thailand. At least when I was there. Then we started walking again, up more hills and down more hills. Sometimes we were walking by the stream and jumping across stones and sometimes we were walking through a path in jungle or something that was kind of like a bamboo forest. Finally, we came to a small bamboo house on the river where we would be sleeping. The beds were exactly the same as the night before. We were all really hot and sweaty so we changed into our bathing suits and took a swim in the river. Everyone was gone by the time I was ready to get out. When I was walking to shore, I stepped on a bamboo raft, which we would take the next day. The bamboo was slippery and I fell on it. When I fell, a little stub was sticking out of the bamboo and it went into my foot. I had a very bad scrape on the bottom of my foot and that night I couldn't walk very well. The next day I was very careful not to slip on the raft again. We went down the river on the rafts for about an hour. We saw lots of water buffalo. There were lots of rapids, too. It was really fun. When were done rafting, we took the rafts apart and some people took the bamboo poles up on shore and we started up the hill. Finally we got to the truck again and we drove to a waterfall where we got to swim. I didn’t want to because there were lots of rocks on the bottom and they hurt my cut. When everyone who wanted to had gone in the water, we got back into the truck for the drive back to our guesthouse. That was a really fun trek.