ever seen. When someone says carved into the side of a mountain they're talking about this road. The town itself was very quiet with a nice museum (being honest we didn't actually go in) and a temple at the top of the hill in the centre of the town. The highlight of which apparently is the Buddha's foot which as you can see for yourselves came about as the result of some lad painting a rough shape of the foot in gold paint on a rock. Needless to say after 350 steep steps to get there we weren't impressed.We headed to Chiang Mai by air this time instead of getting a 3 day boat journey or another 24 hr bus. We were quite impressed by Laos Airlines which is not something I thought I'd ever say. Chiang Mai is Thailand's second city where you can pretty much do anything from massage and cooking courses to zip lining to playing with tigers and of course trekking. The first night we headed to some proper Muay Thai kickboxing in the local stadium. Amazingly it happened to be the biggest fight of the year with a Scottish guy called Sean Wright fighting in the main event. The fights themselves were pretty good with the Scot taking a bit of a hockeying truth be told. The higlight of the night though was Mick and Ed joining the band who actually signal the end of the round by changing the tempo of the song. I think the video explains it all.
The next day, after much deliberation we decided to go on the two day trek which would later turn out to be a wise choice. Our group consisted of the five of us, three English girls and a couple from Phoenix, Arizona.
The first day started with a ride out to a waterfall where we all jumped in. As you can see from
the photos we didn't really enjoy it! The power of the water was something else. At one stage Mark came out from under it thinking Mick had been punching him on the top of his head. After this we headed for the hot spring which were basically 3 pools of water formed from the hot spring half a mile away. The first two pools were too hot to get into but we 
managed to sit down in the third one eventually. There was also a swimming pool there filled with the hot water which was relaxing to say the least. Being told to get out of it to start the trek was heartbreaking.The trek started with a little walk up to see the hot spring where the water is literally boiling on the surface. After that we started the trekking proper. Our first 30 minutes was up a pretty steep hill which would have been ok save for the bag and lifejacket on our back and the fact that it's the middle of the jungle. It wasn't long before the conversation dried up and the sweat started to pour out of us. A little longer and pretty much everyone was a) thanking God that they didn't do the 3 day trek and b) wondering why anyone would go trekking in the first place.
It eased up after a while and we got to the first of three hillside tribes. I didn't expect the big satellite dish and the solar panels on the way in but you'll do what you gotta do to watch MTV. The scenery from the tops of some of the hills, when we weren't staring at the ground in front of us or checking our shoes for leeches (oh they loved Darragh and his shoes so much) was pretty amazing in fairness. We eventually got to our camp after some dodgy bamboo bridges, many slips and falls and an awful lot of cursing the Thai countryside for being so mountainy. It contained some rather interesting livestock the pick of which was the giant pig, the crazy chickens who chased away the dogs and a cat who made the strangest wailing sound we'd ever heard. We had our dinner, a few drinks and a bit of a singsong before hitting the bamboo hut and passing out for the night.
The next morning I went to find the tap to brush my teeth only to find an elephant looking at me. There were 3 more down in the river having a wash but after listening to that cat since 6am
they were a welcome distraction. After breakfast we hopped onto the bamboo rafts (Darragh and Ed's raft had to have extra bamboo added......you'll understand why later). The rafting proved interesting at times especially going down the rapids with the raft veering into the bank and Mark and Mick bashing into a tree making a slingshot which caught me in the chest sending me sprawling into the white water. I recovered gracefully and managed to hold onto my bamboo pole. We stopped after about 5km to go elephant riding. Not something I ever thought I would do but hey, when in Rome. I shared an elephant with Darragh and let's just say it was leaning a little to the right! I've never seen a man topple an elephant but O' Keeffe was gunning for it.
The elephants varied from our guy who just wanted to eat all the time by traipsing off into the jungle munching leaves to Mick's who just didn't want to walk at all to the baby elephant who spent most of it's time swimming in under it's mother. We hopped off after an hour or so and went back for some more rafting before having lunch and getting the bus back to the hostel. Tomorrow we're thinking of going playing with some tigers. After the leeches, suicide chickens, moaning cats and elephant toppling sure what harm could it do!
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