Hiking in Thailand's Jungle

New Year's Day. Ruth and I woke up really early to prepare for our hike. It was a two day, one night adventure. It was a small group, the two of us, our tour guide whom never once introduced himself to us and a French man that was rather interesting. The first half of the morning, we were given the typical run-around of a tour in Thailand. Finally, after lunch we embarked on our hike. The jungle that we hiked in was fantastic. I showered myself in the cancer causing chemical of deet to keep the mosquitoes off me. We had only been in the "high-concentration of mosquitoes" part for about 2 minutes when our tour guide killed one that was a malaria-mosquito. Thank goodness for the pills I was taking.

The jungle wasn't one that is tromped through a lot. Our guide, along with a knife sharp enough to behead someone cut his way through the overgrown bush. He even cut down an entire banana tree with this knife. He taught us survival techniques in the jungle - such as if you ever come become prey of snakes. His knowledge extended to the types of jungle food one can eat. He always gave it to us to try, but it was never anything I'd want to try again. The view was fantastic. It wasn't a terribly difficult hike but nice to be out nonetheless.

Our resting place for the night was in an Akha hill tribe village. We got there just around dinner time and turned the bamboo hut into home. The hut which was typical of what the hills tribe people sleep in was built up on stilts with hard futons, a few blankets and a mosquito net to sleep under. The porch had a gorgeous overlook of the hills in the distance. We all changed into fresher clothes and relaxed. The actual hill tribes people live about a 5 minute walk away from where we were staying. We were staying in their village technically but not imposing on them at all. Unless, they came to our part of the hill, they'd never know we were there. I preferred it that way.

There was one man that was in charge of assisting us. His hut was across the threshold from our hut. He served us tea, brought us snacks and ended up helping our guide by making us dinner and breakfast. The helper man was sweet, no words ever exchanged between us but his smile always so friendly. Later on, while the French man was in the hut talking on his cell phone (yes, his cell phone worked here!) - Ruth and I had a visitor. His name was Chang. Chang was this vibrant 11year old boy.

Our guide while walking had made this pop gun out of a bamboo twig. It soon becomes a spitball gun with the help of some paper. Luckily for me, I had brought a small notepad of paper to keep notes that was soon used for ammunition. Chang taught us. First, rip off a piece of paper and put it in your mouth. While inside your mouth, soak it with your spit and make it into a ball. Put the spit covered ball of paper in one side of the gun. In the other side, put in more bamboo and put it in and out quickly to get some energy going. Last - push the bamboo in and watch the spit ball go POP and fly.

We must have done this for a good 45 minutes. The spit balls getting increasingly larger and us starting to aim for targets such as the local pig or what not. Chang was great - always laughing and never getting tired of the spit ball gun. He was good company. Soon, night fell and we were served dinner. With the setting of the sun and the increase in altitude by being in the hills, it was incredibly cold. I had brought layers and layers but nothing could prepare me for the coldness of the night. Ruth, the tour guide and I played several rounds of rummy by candlelight before calling it a night at 9:30pm. There's not much to do at night in a bamboo hut without electricity.

I must have slept nearly 11 hours when the tour guide forced me awake to have breakfast with the others. We hiked back down that day with even more wild plants to eat, coming across a beautiful waterfall and him showing us more and more tricks

As we made our descent, I couldn't help but to be impressed with the agility the guide had in the jungle. He was always 5 steps ahead of us chopping stuff down, moving rocks in the stream for us to walk over, making sure the trail was clear. What took him a split second would take me a minute to even figure out what to do next. He knew this jungle like the back of his hand. It was at this point that I realized it's no wonder we couldn't win the Vietnam war. This man has been raised in the jungles, hunts in the jungles, he is practically one with the jungle. There's no way we could compete with this type of knowledge, no matter how much training our soldiers may have had. This guy was good. He's been doing it for 35 years, easily. He doesn't need to think twice, he sees, he reacts, he's ahead. Thanks to our skillful guide, we made our way back into Chiang Rai with enough time to shower and catch our scheduled afternoon bus back to Chiang Mai.

Click HERE for all the photos.

New Year's Eve in Chiang Rai

Chiang Rai was a haven away from tourist central, so we thought. Unfortunately, it wasn't so much that way at all. Sitting from our dinner restaurant the night before, you couldn't tell at all if we were in Thailand or a Western country from the stores in our view. All of English or American backgrounds. Ah, well. It provided us for decent shopping for things we needed for our upcoming hike. It was New Year's Eve this day and a bit cooler than Chiang Mai since we were even more northern. This day was pretty much a temple day for us. The temple you see below was nearby our guesthouse. Not even sure of the name of it but just went in for a quick glance.


The main goal of our day was to get to this one temple that was recommended to us by the tour guide we booked with the night before. It is called Wat Rong Khun and was out of central Chiang Rai. We went to the marketplace and somehow bartered with the songthaew drivers without any English on where we wanted to go and for a decent price. It was probably about 20 minutes out of Chiang Rai using a songthaew. It's pretty much the main transportation used in Thailand. In Chiang Rai, they were a regular truck and in the back, there's a roof and two benches where the customers sit facing each other. You tell the driver where you want to go and negotiate a price. So, you cram as many people as you can, sometimes 15 people in the back of these trucks and all going separate directions.

Wat Rong Khun temple was phenomenal, my most favorite temple by far. In case you haven't noticed yet, in Thailand, all the temples are glittery gold. Wat Rong Khun was completely white set atop lush, green grass and with the bluest skies that day. According to wikipedia, the white color stands for the Lord Buddha’s purity; the white glass stands for the Lord Buddha’s wisdom that shines brightly all over the earth and the universe.

The place was just brimming with people. As it's new, only just recently constructed - it's not mentioned in guide books yet. In fact, it's not even completely finished. So shockingly, we were the only people there that weren't Thai. When approaching to go to the main temple, you have to cross a bridge. The bridge represents the crossing over from the cycle of rebirth to the Abode of Buddha. The small semicircle before the bridge stands for the human world. The big circle with fangs is the mouth of Rama or Rahu, meaning impurities in the mind, a representation of hell or suffering. The bridge isn't there to protect you from water, but rather from hundreds of hands reaching out at you. Each hand is uniquely different. Some fingers are regular, some are like alien, some have crazy nails, some have amphibian like hands, one nail had nail polish, one hand was giving me the middle finger, no two were the same. We walked through the temple twice to get a good feel for it. I still remember it very clearly over a month later.
Getting back to Chiang Rai from the temple was a bit more difficult than getting to the temple. We were hoping to catch another Songthaew but weren't really sure where to find one. We decided just to start walking and flag one down. We reached the main strip of road, somewhat like a highway and we still hadn't seen one. Ok, we thought, the walk won't be that bad. Walking, walking, walking...sweet a Chiang Rai sign! Shit, 13 kilometers. Nothing to do but keep walking - 3 bicyclists pulled up besides us and starting speaking to us in Thai. I said back to them Chiang Rai because I figured they were asking why the hell we were walking there. Since we couldn't communicate they just keep going on. Finally, we saw one of these Songthaews coming down the road, we flagged it down and hopped in. Thank goodness. About 4 minutes later, we passed those bicyclists and I waved goodbye to let them know we'd get to Chiang Rai okay.

The next place we went to was the Hill tribe museum and Education Center. I don't even know where to start on about Hill Tribes in Thailand, it's a topic that I am actually researching right now for my adult advanced class. Basically, in a nutshell - there are 6 predominant groups of hill tribes that reside in mainly Northern Thailand. They have emigrated from Myanmar/Burma, Laos and Southern bits of China to escape persecution for one reason or another. Here they reside in Thailand for hundreds of years, moving from one area to another once they run out of good land to grow crops on/live on. These people have no money, no schools, no health care, no rights as humans. Some are trying to wait their time out until human rights workers can get them to developed countries as war refugees to set up a new life. There are all sorts of issues that have arisen with these people. The Hill Tribe museum high-lited not only their cultures and history but about several controversial issues. I'll leave that for another day as well. Maybe, I'll post up here on what I end up writing for my adult class because we'll be talking about all the controversial bits. Strangely enough, since returning from Thailand, one of the main issues has been written about on the BBC.

Here are the links, if you're interested in this topic:

A video report on it

The written report

I promise, I'll post up my report on it in the next week for further information. The museum really affected me, it was so informational and one of the best things I did in Thailand. I hate being 24 and feeling so ignorant about topics. This is one of those topics that I wish I had known more about prior to my trip. The museum was really eye-opening and pretty amazing. We must have spent about 2 hours there before leaving.

The last place we went to on this day was a temple called Doi Tong - which was placed high up on a hill. We read that it was supposed to offer amazing sunset views - but that was a bit of lie. You couldn't really see much because the trees were too high. It would have been beautiful had we been able to see it. We got to see some of the landscaping through openings and it was spectacular.
Doi Tong is described as a phallic Stonehenge up on the hill. It's supposed to be the Buddhist layout of the universe. The biggest penis was made to represent Mount Sineru, the axis of the universe, while the series of other smaller penises and moats and pillars are to represent the heavens and the earth, the great oceans and rivers and the major features of the universe. I think you need a really phenomenal imagination to be able to see all that, but that's how the story goes.

So, yea, today was New Year's Eve. We started it out at a restaurant that had live dancing and music.
But we actually rang the New Year's in at the Tee Pee bar with a bunch of Australians and their tour guide. The bartender was absolutely insane, he didn't ever speak - he only screamed. He took your order in an Ozzy Osbourne type of way...screaming. HOW CAN I HELP YOU? THAT'S TWENTY BAHT! HELLO! and all the while screaming along with the music that he chose to play...which also involved screaming. If I were friends with him, I'd nickname him SCREAMER. The bartender and tour guide put together a beer bong for us. So, I did my first beer bong in like 4 years that night....Ruth did one and so did some of the Aussie's.
For the countdown, we all made a circle around a table and put our arms around each other and counted down and screamed HAPPY NEW YEAR! It's not such a big deal in Thailand because they don't really celebrate New Year's Eve as December 31st like we do in Western countries. So for being in small Chiang Rai, if we wanted to celebrate it, we needed to celebrate it with other Westerners. It was a lot of fun though. The night ended when one of the Aussie's started throwing up all over the place and Ruth and I decided since we had to wake up early to go hiking it should be time to go.

Click here to see all the pictures from this day

Baan Thai Cooking School

Our last day in Chiang Mai, Ruth and I went to a cooking school. We went with one of the recommended spots out of our guidebook that also caters to vegetarians. There were 5 other people in our class besides Ruth and I. Our teacher was a cute Thai girl, probably 28 named Yam, but she told us to call her Yummy. After very brief introductions, we all went to the local market to get the food we needed for the day.. Yam pointed out all the different types of food at the available. It's hard going to a new country with all this new food and not knowing what any of it is just by looking at it.
After about an hour at the market, we went back to our school. Yam brought us out a Thai "welcome snack" to wait on while she prepared stuff. This includes many different ingredients - coconut, dried shrimp (or without for the vegetarian), ginger,lime, shallots, chili peppers, and roasted peanuts. You take a type of green leaf and you fold it so it kind of is in the shape of an ice cream cone. Then, you put all those above ingredients into it - soooooooo good.

After that, the first thing we made was papaya salad. This dish includes papaya, garlic, chillies, tomato, green beans, peanuts and some sauces. You are given a mortar to use to pound it all together. You can choose how many chilies you want to put in it for spiciness.
1 = somewhat spicy
2 =spicy
5 or more = Thai spicy
I went with 2 chilies. So, you put the bulk of the ingredients into the mortar and mash away with a heavy pounding stick. That's it! Put on a dish and it's done! We also made spring rolls to eat with this dish as well. It was good, shocking that I can actually cook in fact. After that, we made mango sticky rice - which is just soaking sticky rice in coconut milk for an hour and then putting mangos on top. We did that now to make sure the rice was soaking while cooking more.
While the mango sticky rice was sitting, we moved on to make curry paste. This involved mashing just a bunch of red chillies, shallots, garlic, Thai ginger, lemongrass (which actually smells like lemon!), lime, coriander and tumeric root in the mortar. We took turns passing the mortar around and mushing the stuff together because your arm gets really tired after a while. She said there's a rumor in Thailand that a good Thai wife makes a lot of noise as the pestle (stick that you mash with in the mortar) - hits the mortar. A bad wife is quiet about the process. Once the ingredients have become smooth and fine, it's finished! We used the curry paste to make the next dish, my favorite Thai dish called Khao Soy. It's popular in this region of the country...not sure if you can find it in the Southern bits of Thailand.

You put the freshly made curry sauce, oil, and indian curry powder together in a wok. After a while, you add coconut milk, tofu (or chicken), and keep stirring. Then you put it over cooked egg noodles. It becomes likes a soup. Then, you put hard noodles over it when ready to serve. It was soooooo delicious.
Afterwards, we ate our mango sticky rice. Yum! The school was a lot of fun and it was nice mingling with the other students. There was a guy from Corning, NY who currently resides in Hong Kong. A French couple currently residing in Jakarta and a Malaysian couple (that actually live in their country). It was nice to talk to others who are "ex-pats" living in Asian countries and hearing their challenges and experiences. I enjoyed comparing it to my own experience here in Japan. We all got along well. In the evening, we went shopping in the markets with Tamo and said goodbye.

The next morning Ruth and I headed up to Chiang Rai but with a few complications. We had intended on taking an 11:30 bus up North. We were unfortunately barred from this when all buses were full until about 3:30. So, we sat in this coffee shop for 4 hours because unfortunate for us, the bus station isn't central at all so we had nowhere else to go. Here's a photo of what it was like there - we did a lot of reading, writing and listening to our ipods before finally getting on the bus.
The bus ride went smoothly aside from a weird stop we had. The bus pulled over, a police man came on and shouted something in Thai. We couldn't understand him but saw lots of people pulling out their ID's. Well, if you know anything about traveling in 3rd world countries, it's not very uncommon for foreigners to be bribed to pay a lot of money. I thought that is what was going to happen. I was really nervous searching for my passport. Luckily though, that didn't happen - instead one man was removed from the bus and we were back on our way. Here's a photo of Ruth and I on the bus - happy we're on the bus and I was happy we weren't bribed.
This was December 30th. The next day was December 31st, New Year's Eve. We had wanted to be hiking on this day but since we got into Chiang Rai a lot later than expected, we couldn't get the reservations made in time. So, we had to settle for booking it for January 1st. After making our booking, we just had some dinner out on town and went to bed. I'll write about New Year's Eve next blog.

Click here for pictures from this day and for a sneak preview of the next blog.