Trekking in the Mountains

The trekking group w/ our guide Moonshine
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I met Ellie (Elnaz) at the Bangkok airport a little past midnight.  It's so great to see her again, the last time was ages ago when I was leaving LA back in July.  Needless to say there was much catching up to do.  We spent the first 2 days of her visit hanging around Bangkok, shopping and seeing the sights (including a huge wild lizard, a monitor, that happened to be living in the canal - um, next to a pile of floating garbage and a dead cat, ahh city life).

Hanging out at the village
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From there we took the night train to Chiang Mai, the 2nd largest city in Thailand, but with a much more serene vibe than Bangkok.  We stayed in a little guest house in the old part of the city - an area filled with old wats and surrounded by a square moat.  The place, Julie's Guest House, was cute with a rather hippy vibe and brightly colored walls, plus a rooftop lounge with a bunch of pillows and hammocks.  At the guest house we booked a 2 day 1 night trekking trip through the hills just North of the city.

We spent much of the evening listening to music
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The trek started with an elephant ride through the jungle.  Our elephant was named Mokemon, a fuzzy headed elephant a bit smaller than the others, but with a lot of "spunk" and an unending hunger for leaves.  There were 10 of us, so 2 per elephant.  The chair wobbled and rocked as we rode uphill on a rocky path into the woods, stopping every so often so the elephants could snack - it was very fun.

After elephant riding Moonshine, our funny guide who got his name for drinking a bit too much moonshine when he was younger, took us on a pretty intense 3 hour hike up a mountain to his village.  The hill tribe were Black Lahus, originally from Tibet - but moved to Mynnamar/Burma, then Northern Thailand.  We stayed at a bunk house in there village for the night.  Moonshine's brother, a teen who I think had aspirations of being a rock star, played the guitar for us during the evening.  He was quite good and knew a whole range of English and Thai songs, including stuff by Eric Clapton, the Eagles, and Pink Floyd.  Staying up late we chatted with the others in our trekking group - 2 sweet Irish girls, and the guys (English, Aussie, Can., Swe, Chinese, and Slovenian).  The next morning we hiked down to a nearby waterfall, followed by white water rafting.  That went fairly smoothly, besides the first set of rapids where we got stuck backwards for about 10 minutes while our inflatable raft kept filling and overflowing with river water.  We went bamboo rafting next at a calmer section of the river - very serene just floating down the river ...