Ants, Elephants and Rafting

We’re just back from jungle trekking in the hills near Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, visiting some tribal villages and paddy fields along the way.

Our guide was an odd character who wore a Dublin Gaelic football jersey and spoke like an electronic translator: good vocabulary but speaking very slowly with random pauses mid-sentence and most words with misplaced emphasis...sounding like a robot actually. He also sang random Lion King songs as we trekked!

Along the way we came across these local tribal children. They weren’t totally secluded from Western Culture, however. Rather than being fascinated with cameras like we might have expected, they were well used to them, and always insisted on doing some “cool” pose for the photo....like something from a teen magazine.

Camp.....earlier that day, we had commented on the number of ants we spotted on the trail. Someone observed that there are apparently more ants in the world than grains of sand. Interesting information, we thought, but didn’t really believe it. Moving on...our camp was a makeshift hut from bamboo. We all slept on mats on the floor in the one room. It appeared relatively comfy at first (for a jungle camp) but as we drifted off to sleep, we noticed occasional nipping and itching. It seemed that there were “one or two” ants in the hut, so we squished the ones we saw, moved around on the floor a bit, and went back to sleep. But the biting and itching got progressively worse as the night went on. We found ourselves not really getting to sleep because as we drifted off, we would soon have to shuffle around again to shake off the ants, so we could never really relax. It got worse and by 2am we were still awake and looking around the room we realised that ALL of our fellow campers were up dealing with their own personal ant crisis. The little buggers were everywhere! By this stage, one chain of ants had made a busy path going right across Conor’s pillow, Kadi had an ant in her ear, another girl had a number of ants in her hair. They were everywhere and it got very frustrating. We eventually got tired of constantly squishing them one by one so we went back to our insect repellent and after trying it on a small sample of ants (they didn’t like it)...we put plenty of it all over ourselves, and then sprayed it in a big circle all around our bed/mat. Thankfully, this seemed to do the trick and we had a relatively peaceful night after that....but used more than half a bottle of insect repellent in the process!

As part of the trek, we got to do some elephant riding :) We had only really seen elephants in a zoo before but seeing them up close (and sitting on top of them) you just realise how big they actually are, and they are huge! (Interestingly, elephants are apparently native to this part of the world but they’re not the sort of animals you see around the place. However, as we were being driven home later, our jeep passed a guy on the side of the road who was actually riding an elephant. He looked so casual about it that he may just have been going down to the shops for some milk!)

We finished off the trek with some rafting down a local river. When we saw the rafts first, we weren’t particularly excited because we actually did a few hours of rafting when we were in Jamaica. But then we learned that there would be no guide for this stage of the trek and we were responsible for navigating the raft down the river, it proved to be a lot more fun....crashing into the sides and submerged rocks as we went along.