Three Day Trek - Day 1 - 10 Kilometers

 MONDAY 26 JULY 2010

After checking out of my hotel I was picked up by a truck and taken to ‘Gap House’ Guest House to collect the Polish couple, Iza and Michal, and Kyriakos and Selim, all of whom had done the cookery course with me. We picked up another Dutch couple on the way and drove to a market to buy supplies such as water and a torch, and then drove through the Thai countryside passing villages, paddy fields and cows, winding up through jungle covered mountains.

After about 3 hours we met another group and our guide, Chai, who took us to visit a waterfall which is one of the most spectacular I have seen. We all took a well needed shower!

We drove for another hour and went to a Buddhist temple which is the second highest in the area and set in wonderful scenery. The cicadas were extremely loud and sounded like chain saws! It was Buddha day so there were a few visitors to see the monk.

We then trekked through the jungle up and down hills. Going down was painful on the toes, ankles and knees. Going up was just plain knackering! Chai’s 10 year old son came with us and he was like a puppy running around and covered about twice the distance we did – a future guide in the making! We had to walk between paddy fields on narrow verges, and I lost my balance and slipped in one of them. We came to a magical waterfall where we all took a vigorous shower and then walked to a remote Thai Hmong Tribal village where Chai’s family comes from. The huts were built on stilts with roofs made of banana leaves. Cows and pigs lived underneath the huts and were either tethered or roamed freely round the village, and chickens and baby chicks strutted around scratching at the earth. We had walked about 10 kilometres today at quite a fast pace.

The Hmong village where we stayed the night

We were shown to our hut which was like a long hut with two rooms, one with raised platforms on either side which was open at the front where Chai and his grandfather slept. The 9 of us slept in the other room on the wooden floor on blankets with mosquito nets. Chai and his brother and grandfather cooked our evening meal of green chicken curry, rice, and bamboo and cucumber. It gets dark about 7.30 and as there was no electricity in our hut we used torches and candlelight. Chai’s grandfather uses a head torch. Government projects have provided electricity to some of the huts by means of solar panels and water has been piped from water sources to provide communal water in the village. The toilet was a squat toilet with a pipe leading to a big drum. If you wanted to wash or shower, you had to connect the pipe at the kitchen end and any excess water ran into the drum, which was then used for the toilet.

It was Iza’s birthday so we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in English and then there were solos in Welsh, Polish, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Greek! We had brought some rum with us which was passed around, and Chai made cigarettes from a strong local tobacco and tamarind wrapped in banana leaves. Later we went out to see the full moon and saw fireflies (really, it was not the effect of the rum!)