Chiang Mai, the awesomest city that ever awesomed.

Wayne took us to a market he had found in his solo wanderings the day before. This market was clearly not for tourists; it was where local people shop, and I loved it, though I would rather stick a fork in my eye than buy meat there. Still, it wasn’t as gross as the chicken-seller-next-to-a-dumpster scene from Ubud in Bali, and there was more to see. And it was packed, really packed. Markets are so great I can hardly believe it, and you really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a pig’s head hanging from a hook in the tropical air.
On day four, we set out on our overnight trek. Our guide was a Karen man named Det, or Daed, or whatever the transliteration was that day, and another nice guy whose name we missed the first time and never learned again. On our way to the national park, we stopped at a market for supplies, which was smaller but more exotic than the previous day’s (basket of frogs, anyone?). Once up in the forest, our first stop was a gorgeous double waterfall, which we were invited to swim in, though none of us did. After a lunch stop, we arrived at a natural mini-geyser. It wasn’t very spectacular, but still a neat thing to see for Wayne, Dawn and I, coming from geyser-free countries. From there, we began our hike – about three hours, eight kilometers I think. We pretty much hiked up and down two large hills / small mountains, with a break in a village between them. At the top of the second mountain, our guide pointed out the misty hills in the distance, which were in Myanmar. So now I’ve been to eight countries and seen nine. Neat. We spent the night in a Karen village, in a big raised wooden building built for visitors. We had a communication barrier with our hosts, who of course didn’t speak English, but didn’t speak Thai either. It would’ve been nice to chat with them a bit, through translation, but no effort was made on either part, so too bad, I suppose.
In the morning, we hiked another hour or so over the next mountain to reach the next village, and elephant camp. We were here for an elephant ride, of course, though there was already quite a mob of other tourists when we arrived, so we had to wait a while. We passed the time with a friendly dog who very bravely attempted to cross a wonderfully rickety bridge over the river.
When our elephants finally arrived, we hit a snag; the elephants are equipped for two passengers and the mahout; since there were five of us, Dawn and I had one elephant, and Dave, Wayne and Chris had the other, though Wayne had to sit on the elephant’s neck, completely mahout-less. It was a very pleasant and slow journey up the river (often actually in the river), with our elephant’s calf tagging along for the walk. The final stage of our brief trekking adventure was a trip on a bamboo raft. These were incredibly stable for a bunch of bamboo tied together, and we also had the benefit of having two Thai guys punting (the other rafts had one, meaning one of the tourists had to punt too). Again, it was a beautiful, peaceful ride, through forest like none of us had ever seen, it’s safe to say, though two hours of standing perfectly still gets a little achy. We pulled ashore at a sort of rafting camp / resort thing, where we had lunch and returned to Chiang Mai.