Hilltribe Trek Day 2

This was the "hard" day of our trek.  It started easy, but pretty soon, we found a pretty steep uphill that looked even steeper in the heat of the day.  The group was upbeat and cheerful, so we all went up the hill with little problem with just a few water breaks.  The terrain during the hike was a combination of forest with the occasional opening into a field where the local people cultivate rice, corn, and tea.  May is the time to plant rice so that's the primary crop that we saw.

At the top of the hill, there was a wonderful resting tree.  It was interesting getting there, but it was nice to perch myself on it after the hot trek up.  Many of the people of the group followed me, with different degrees of success...  From the top of the hill, it was a nice downhill to the elephant camp.  At the camp, there were 6 elephants just playing around next to the creek.  As we got closer, two of them switch to some "adult play" which turned to be quite a show.

As we were having lunch, the handlers were preparing the elephants for our ride.  They all got a nice wash in the river and they set the saddles up (basically a bench for two, sitting in a horse-like saddle).  A pair of the male elephants were challenging each other so they were playfully pushing each other around (later on they were racing each other on the trail).  One of the female elephants was pregnant, but that didn't exclude her to carry two of the smaller people of the group.

After lunch, I saved some of the fruit to share with one of the elephants.  It's kind of scary to walk around these hyge elephants, but I figured out that they were very used to people so it would be fine.  After feeding pineapples and bananas to the elephant, it was time for our exciting ride down the trail to the next hill tribe village.

Our elephant, a dominant male, was saddled up and with the handler we headed down the hill.  I was surprised about how agile elephants are and how they can easily negotiate very narrow trails and steps.  At one time the trail widened and the challenging male that was fighting our elephant, just spring to pass our elephant.  Our elephant didn't like that a bit, but now the other elephant was ahead.  I think our elephant blamed us for his humiliation, so he started to picking up dirt with his trump and blowing it to each of us.  The ride gave us an interesting view of the jungle from higher up.  Unfortunately, no tigers...

Our village for the night was much larger than the previous village.  It had a sizable school and much better built houses.  Our homestay was next to the Mae Tang river so we tried to escape the heat by jumping in the river.  The local kids were doing the same, playing in the water a bit upstream from where we were.

Next to the river there were beautiful flowers and "sleeping plants", an amazing plant that closes its leaves when is touched.  We have the same plant in Venezuela, in fact, most of the plants in Thailand are surprisingly similar to the ones in Venezuela.  Even the fruits and the food in general(except for the amount of chilies) is very similar.  Sometimes it felt like I was back there, except that I was surrounded by smiling Thai people. 

In the late afternoon, it looked like the weather was turning really bad, but we just had a short rain shower and the blue skies returned.  It turned that there was a major storm just North of us, but we were lucky and missed us.

After cooking and eating dinner, our local guides came out with silly games designed to get you confused so you make a mistake.  These games were lots of fun, including the "medicine" for making a mistake, getting a sooth mark in your face.  As you can see in the picture above, some people made more mistakes than others :)

After dark, the rain brought a large number of fireflies, so just before going to bed, we were treated to a light show by then.