My tour group: Jeannette, Jane, Mike, P (our guide), Christian, Mirjam, and PJ.

They say that your guide and your tour group makes all the difference on a Trek, and I couldn't agree more. I had an awesome group, and our guide was quite a funny guy, and had been doing this for a while so he knew what he was doing.

Basically our trek was a 3 day hike (with some travel by car) that probably could have been done in 2 days. We started off getting about an hour long elephant ride, then went to an awesome waterfall for a swim, ate dinner and slept at a Karen (Thai Hill tribe) Village for the night. On the second day, we hiked to another waterfall, had lunch at another tribal village, and then slept in this hut in the middle of the jungle. The last day we went bamboo rafting down a river and then got dropped off at back at our hotel. The 2 day trek was basically day 1 and day 3 if you are interested.

So first the first thing we did was an elephant ride. Elephant used to, in the 70's, be used for logging, but with technological advancement, they became obsolete for this. Since it is very expensive to keep an elephant (just look at what Stampy cost), they would sometimes just let the elephant go and it would do terrible damage to the forest. Now, with the increasing tourism to Thailand, this is a way to keep the elephants (they pretty much use them for tourism now). Anyway, elephant definately don't have good shocks, and going up and down hills can be quite an adventure. Anyway, you can also buy bananas and bamboo to feed the elephants on the tour. They are very demanding, if you give it a banana, it snatches it with it's trunk, eats it and then the trunk is right back up there for another banana. I ended up getting quite dirty because the we were also feeding the one behind us and he would rub his trunk all over me in an attempt to get a banana.

The scenery here is really nice, it's a much hotter forest than back in Canada, I kept expecting to see slugs on the ground, evergreens, and lots of different kinds of birds. Not the case, it was pretty dry and all you could really see we dragon flies, spiders and the occasional bird. There were also these tiny insects that let out this loud whistling sound from up in the trees. They were so small you couldn't see them from the ground but you could sure hear them. I asked our guide P what there name was but he just said it was an insect. Basically all you could see was green space. The were lots of trees, some palm and some regular deciduous trees. Along the ground were many types of shrubs. Thais who live in the hills don't use modern medicine at all, and rely on the plants and roots for their remedies. There was one plant that they would rub on cuts to help them heal, and boiling the roots in a tea helps to cleanse the body.

The villages and stops I will talk about in another entry, so next I will go on to the rafting as the second day was just really hiking. We got on these tiny rafts that were about 6 large bamboo poles tied together, and then with the guide steering at the front went down the river. It wasn't rough really, but it was a lot of fun. The were 4 on our raft, two people sat down in the middle, while the one stood near the front and the other "helped steer" at the back. We actually made little difference at the back, but it was kinda fun to pretend we were doing something :) It was about and hour, and by the time we were done, our shorts were all soaked (as there were some smaller rapids that would come up and splash you, but we managed to go the whole way without falling in.