Blogging Pubbitch

We've now returned from our trekking, tired but both glad that we'd done it. Holly loved the elephant riding, which was made more interesting by the fact that our elephant was keen to get a snack in at the drop of a hat, grabbing a trunk-full of bamboo leaves whenever no-one was paying him enough attention. Naturally, this involved a somewhat ungainly trot, leaving Holly and I clinging to our precarious perch with white knuckles!

The trekking itself was extremely hard work, involving hiking up seemingly vertical jungle paths, only to descend by equally steep paths down the other side. It would appear that where we'd be tempted to use some sort of switchback, to lessen the graident, the Thai's don't worry themselves with the extra work and just go for the straight line approach. Despite the sweating, there were some amazing views, though, and if you're fit then I'd recommend that you go along, if you get the chance.

We spent the first night in a Karen village, sleeping on the floor of one of the teak houses on stilts that appear to be the traditional Thai housing. I slept perfectly well, but Holly found sleeping on a hard woen floor without a pillow or much padding a difficult experience. The Karen people were lovely to us, and we had a fair proportion of the village in the house with us until the small hours. They make their own "moonshine" whiskey, and after a while they started bringing out bottles of the stuff. It was lethal!

The trekking the next day ended by about 1, so we spent the rest of the day relaxing at the hut we'd stopped at. It was just by a river, so three of us went off with the guide to muck around in it. While we were there, the guiide returned with a circualr fishing net, the kind that you throw, with weights around the edge so it sinks to the bottom. Despite spending two or three hours practising, we only magaed to catch one (rather small!) fish, though Holly managed to grab some photos, which should come out well.

In the evening, we helped build part of the bamboo raft we were going to use the next day. The raft basically consisted of long lengths of bamboo lashed together with strips of more bamboo. We werre exceptionally pleased that they appeared to be practically unsinkable, even with lots of people standing on them.

The next day we found out how wrong that impression was, when we went down some white water. Because it was so shallow, and because we hit random rocks, the raft started coming apart. By the end of the trip, one of us was holding the back of the thing together and Holly was desperately trying to lash up the middle of it. Despite these efforts, we still managed to loose about a third of the width of the raft.

When we weren't in danger of sinking, the trip down the river was lovely. The sun was out, and the only sounds you could hear were from the river and the jungle. Two of us (a Canadian called Bart and myself) took it in turns to punt the raft down the river, with a Thai guide at the front doing a lot of the legwork too. Whenever we were in the rapids, the punting turned more to "fending off" which took a surprsing amount of effort.