Saschas World

I’m back from my 3-day Trekking Tour to Doi Chiang Dao National Park in the North-West of Thailand (near Chiang Mai)

It was absolutely fabulous and I thoroughly enjoyed hiking through the jungle* but staying with some of the Hilltribes was definitely the highlight of the trip.

*: The guides like to call the forests up here in Northern Thailand “Jungle” and althought it seems a bit silly to me to call it Jungle I will stick with their terminology..

The map below is almost right. Before the trek we had the visit to the Long-Neck Tribe.

Here’s the details of the last three days:

Day 1:

Got picked up from Hotel on Thursday (19/01/06) around 9am. Stopped at Panda Tours Headoffice first to meet the other people of the group and to sort out some paperwork. Every trekking tour needs to register with the tourist police for safety reasons… My group consists of 11 people including myself. A group of four people from Guernsey? (one of them originally from Finland) who travelled through India for a few months, two younger guys from England that were on RTW but westwards and four Hungarian guys on a short vacation who did not speak much english.

Initally we drove about 1.5 hours north-west of Chiang Mai to visit a Long-Neck Hilltribe Village.
I was not too keen on this part of the trip but it was part of the tour.. When we arrived the village felt like a typical tourist place, similar to the villages I have seen during my trip to Doi Inthanon if not more so.
Maybe because the Long-Neck Women looked so strange to me that I didn’t feel like this could be very realistic. I decided to take pictures although it didn’t feel right especially when I saw some little kids with the rings around their necks. Longneck tribes start adding rings to girls necks at the age of 4 years and add one more ring about every other year until they are 25 years old. After that the rings remain.

NB: After the tour I spoke to some thai people about those Longneck people and that I didn’t think it was a good experience since I felt those people are being exloited. I was told that the village we saw was indeed a tourist village but that there a still several genuine Longneck villages in northern thailand that have been pretty much untouched by tourism and that people still hold on to their traditions of the neck rings. In the tourist villages the girls/women do wear neck rings out of tradition but take advantage of the tourists interest in their tradtions to earn money.
OK if this is the case but the feeling remains that the little girls get the neck rings because of the tourism, not because of traditions..

On a lighter note I did see the first cute baby here 😉

(All Long-Neck Hill Tribe Pictures)

So I’m not sure about the long-neck part of the trip but the rest was pretty good..

Next had lunch nearby and then jumped on a pickup truck to drive up the mountain for half an hour or 40 minutes until we reached a local village. The pickup truck was really just that, an open space at the back where twelve of us tried to hold onto something while the truck drove steep dirt tracks uphill to the little village were we would start out hiking.. Not the most pleasant but quite funny since more than once some folks almost slipped of the back of the truck when we drove up steep slopes or the driver didn’t pay attention and drive into dips in the road that were flushed out by the last rain..

Eventually we reached the village. We did not look around the village except for walking through the local school (1,2) but just started walking.
It was just after lunch time and thus sunny and rather hot. I had a daypack will the gear for 3 days which felt way too heavy but it was probably just about 7kg? I guess ..

It was suggested to bring warm clothes for the night since it gets rather cold up in the hills and we would sleep in bamboo huts.. Aso clothes fo changing and sleeping in, Sandals (I wore my walking shoes), Socks Towel, Insect Spray, Suncream, Torch, Toilet Paper etc.. the usual stuff .. plus camera and a days worth of water (call it 2L).

I had to buy a small rucksack for this which cost surprisingly much money. Paid about 25 pounds for a descent one from North Face (or so it sais on the back;-) It’s a good rucksack with airmesh at the back that worked very well during my trip. Never felt too uncomfortable..

Anyway, where was I.. we started walking..

After about 5 minutes we had the first “unexpected” challenge of crossing a little river (ok lets call it a burn in true scottish fashion cos it was not much of a river really:-). Wearing my walking shoes I did not like the idea of getting wet feet that early on in the trip. The little tree that lay across the water which we were supposed to use to cross over did not look very convincing either and rather wet and slippery.
None of us was convinced about this and our guide (who swiftly and without problems walked over the tree trunk to the over side of the river) must have notice and came to the rescue by thowing us a stick to aid the balancing act. It helped most of us (including myself) but one quite didn’t manage and stepped into the water briefly… Two took the easy route through the water as shown here at our 2nd river crossing about 5 minutes later since they wore sandals…
Two river crossings and risk of gettig wet feet/shoes within a few minutes of walking.. This Trekking seemed not such a good idea over sudden 😉

Well we had a few more rivers but I was lucky enough to manage all of them without getting wet.

We walked mostly on Jungle Treks, some barely existing paths, others wider ones and well used. Ocasionally we hit some dirt tracks (roads) but mustly we walked through the Jungle.

Paths were steep to say the least 🙂 It was pretty tough going most of the time yet our Guide kept encouraging us with the words “Easy, Easy” and pointing forward meaning soon we would find some lesser steep paths to walk on. It mostly didn’t happen though or maybe the meaning of Easy differs depending on whether you are a Thai Guide or a silly Tourist who booked a Trekking Tour 😉

Strangely enough (and much to my own surprise) I really enjoyed myself every minute of it.
I actually think I was (for a change) the only person who was not moaning and groaning during this Trek.
Some said “Oh I didn’t expect this amount of walking….” and even the Hungarian Guys who looked like they came out for the “real thing” had some funny “I wish I hadn’t..” expressions on their faces every now and then 😀

It was like having a good workout at the gym except it was for a whole day rather than an hour, but it was fun 🙂 I must have been desperate for some excercise cos even though it was hard going, exhausting and every few minutes we had to have a mini-breaks to catch our breath, drink some water and let the rest of the group catch up I couldn’t get enough. Most of the time I kept the guide company chatting with him which meant I somehow managed to keep up with his pace (except when I took pictures which at some point got me in trouble along with two others cos we got separated from the group (here) – oops!).

So after some river crossings and walking through the jungle for an hour we stopped at a Jungle Waterfall. Some decided to go for a swim but it didn’t appeal to me having read about the nasty thingies in the water and all.. Pictures were tricky due to lighting so i could only shoot the Waterfall “>river area.

After a 30 minute break we continues walking. We passed a Tea Planation where some people harvested Tea and I decided to take photos in manual focus mode for some reason (flipped a switch by accident; *bother*)

We walked though a village which cause a few of us (including myself) to get separated from the group whilst taking time to take photographs and once our Guide came back for us we walked through some more Tea Plantations up a steep hill (as most of the time)
Photos

After this the scenery changed and we walked though some Bamboo Forests. Pretty amazing, intense green colors and the light payed nlicely with the green leafs to soak the jungle in various shades of green.
The pictures at the bottom of this page don’t really do it justice (I think I need to get used to selecting the right white balance in future)

Eventually all the uphill walking paid off and we reached some dirt track with some nice more open area views. pictures on top

Now (after about 4 hours of walking) we reached our destination for the day, a Black Lahu Hilltribe Village with Wooden Huts/Houses, open roaming Pigs & Chickens, open fires and interesting “bathrooms”, the pictures of which I lost *crap!*.
Basically they had a small bamboo with a squat toilet and a small water bucket plus bowl for flushing and a water tap at shoulder height as a shower, cold of course;-)

We slept in a wooden house on stilts (all houses are) on thin matresses, two blankets (glad top have my sleep sheet with me) and a moskito net. The only trouble was that the group gathering place and camp fire was right in front of this hut and the smoke went straight up into hut room. Apart from smoking my belongings not too much of a problem since the wood panels of the hut had enough gaps to let fresh air in/ smoke out so the room was not completely filled with smoke 😉

I also had a little wonder around the village at night and just as well because as soon as I stepped into the dark (armed with my torch) I noticed the most amazing night sky with loads of stars visible. (The silly proof is here)

Day 2:

Woke up after a mostly “comfortable” if cold night (my jumper and the blankets were necessary). I got woken up a few times during the early hours thanks to kind wakeup calls of the resident cocks underneith the hut and at last by the smell of fresh smoke entering the hut at around 7am thanks to the Hungarians who decided to get the camp fire going again 🙂

Got up had a very _quick_ cold ” shower and then joined the others after I had gatherd my things and repacked my bag. We had Toast, Boiled Egg and Instant Coffee or Tea, obviously catered for the tourists or else we would have had Thai Breakfast (Rice Soup).

Learned that two of the Guernsey folks had acquired big! blisters (Wet Sandals and loosely tied Army Style Boots being to blame) but the rest of the groups seemed fine.

After taking a few more pictures of the local pigs, villagers and village surroundings (bottom pics) we left the villlage and started our second day of trekking.

Our group split at this point into those on the two day trek and those on the three day trek. The Hungarians and myself did the 3 day trek. I was not too sure about this because they did not speak much english and kept to themselves but the trekking was enough fun to not worry about it too much and it did work out ok in the end. I also got on quite well with our guide which was great as talking to him it kept my mind off the streneous walking uphill.

Talking uphill we had reached about 1300m on the first day and were about to go up to about 1800m so overall the climb should not be too difficult I thought. Little did I know… 😉

The trek started off steeper than the day before and after a few minutes we were soaking wet (it was not raining!) My pictures don’t really show the steepness of the path (though I tried) but one of the hill opposite our path maybe gives an indication, the path we walked was steeper than the slope shown here

As we climbed higher through the very nice looking forest the views of the mountains got better though it was very difficult to photograph because of bright sunlight and lot of haze in the valley and distance. pics

After abour 2.5-3h we reached a nice open area where we had lunch. Ther were a few huts/houses which were used seasonally by hill tribes but most noticeable there were some nice blossoming trees..
We had strifry noodles wrapped in banana leaves that were handed out before we left the Black Lahu Village in the morning. pics

Thirty minutes later we were off again first walking downhill then uphill again higher than before.
The area didn’t classify as jungle anymore but rather mountain Forest, more open spaced trees with a lot of Pine Trees. Very nice and very nice pine forest air as well.
The views were amazing!

This was the highest point during our walk at about 1800m and we soon were walking downhill again and into more jungle’ish forest with lots of tight vegetation, bamboo and also banana trees.
The light created fabulous green colurs again and I just hoped some of the pictures (bottom half) would turn out ok, some kinda did but really only if you see the large versions of them..

There were lost of Wolf Spiders in the Forest. The pictures of the spider on that page
I like because this little fella did not like all the others of his kind hide as soon as I approached to take pictures but rather came out of his tunnel web in three jumpy runs as shown in the pics. (You have to zoom into the first pic to see her hiding in the back of the web; not that you care I guess 😉

We had quite a fast pace (faster than he managed usually with other groups the guide said) so we reached our second village, a Red Lahu Hilltribe Village, just after 3pm after about five and a half hours of walking.

I loved this village as it felt much more like living, breathing village. We got to meet and spend some time with some of the locals which was fabulous. Browse the pictures for yourself on pages 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 for yourself, they are better than words anyway. I have to admit though the ones I love most are without a doubt those with babies in them, they are simply adorable 🙂

For those “soon to be mothers” (Linda): Don’t try this at home!

Day 3:
This one is shortest to describe and I only took few pictures because I could not use my camera for half of the time.

After another cold “shower” in a similar hill tribe bathroom hut though this time the shower consisted of a big barrel of water and a little bowl to scoop water and poor over your head we had our tourist breakfast. Afterwards one of the girls from the village brought some thai breakfast (steamed rice and stirfry green vegetables this time) for our guide. It was plenty of food and since I was talking to the guide at the time I got invited to join them (the girl and her baby ate some too)

Of course good opportunity to shoot a few more pictures of cute hilltribe baby eating rice soup (bottom part) etc..

We walked for about two hours after we left the village. Mostly downhill and then along a (proper) river which we would soon travel on by rubber boat (whitewater rafting) and bamboo raft afterwards.
Before we got to this however we had the peasure of an Elephant Ride (a rather slow experience) which wasn’t really anything to get excited about I have to say (others liked it though).
some pics

After changing into rafting suitable clothes (we would get wet) we left our luggage inc camera with the guide to meet him after the river tour and got into the rubber boat for our whitewater rafting which was quite good fun 🙂 I was sitting at the front right (or rear left at times since half the time we were going backwards since the currents had turned us around:-) We got soaking wet of course but it was worth it. I only wished the river had been a bit wilder” as some stretched were too calm and we could leasurely float down the river rather than having to fight the currents.

After about 45 minutes (shorter than expected) we got off the rubber boat and walked across the river to the other side to get n the bamboo raft. If one of us did not get wet enough during the whitewater rafting he defintely was now as we walked up to our hips in the water.(By the way the tour organiser said we would hardly get wet at all even during white water rafting (“A little” she said, ha ha 🙂

Bamboo Rafting was slow but pleasant as nice scenery. We stood on the raft rather than sitting down..
Another 40 minutes later or so we finished the river tour and stopped somewhere next to the river for lunch (Pad Thai Noodles and Fruit.)

I walked back to the river to take some photos after lunch and noticed some kids playing in the river with individual bamboo logs (one kid bamboo raft if you like) (upper part of this page). It was fun watching them as they had lot of fun themselves 🙂

Soon after we got into a Minivan and drove back to Chiang Mai. On the way we stopped at a Market in Mae Tang (I think) as the Hungarians asked if we could stop there. I took one or two interesting photos chilis and massaging woman, the rest is the usual stuff;-)

And that’s it really – 3 Day Organised Trekking in Northern Thailand.

Best Experience: Meeting the locals at the Red Lahu Village.

Tags: Chiang Mai, Thailand

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Chiang Mai, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.