Saturday was a bit of a rest day. We had planned to do our trekking trip, but I woke up feeling a little ropey so we decided to postpone for a day. So Saturday was just a bumming about day really without anything fun to report.
Sunday however was a lot more interesting and we went on our 1 day trek which took in an elephant ride, a walk to a waterfall, a bamboo raft and a couple of hill tribes.
Another lovely early start and we were on our way, we jumped into the back of the truck that was our transport for the day and introduced ourselves to the rest of the group which consisted of a French Canadian couple, a German guy called Lukas and an Aussie couple called Christian and Vanessa. Everyone seemed lovely and on the 40 min drive to our first stop the conversation and jokes were none stop!
The first stop was a butterfly and orchid farm. This was a bit of a joke really as we saw 1 butterfly in the enclosure.... I'm not sure they really stopped them from getting out or kept replacing them when they died, I understand that butterflies have a pretty short lifespan so to run something like this you need to keep adding new ones each week!!
The orchids were better and there were thousands of varieties all gorgeous:
The next stop was elephant riding. I have to be honest we were both a little unsure about this mainly because we had visited the sanctuary the other day and we felt a little wrong about riding the elephants after seeing videos of how some are treated. At the sanctuary they didn't have a problem with elephant rides providing the animals were well looked after and even said that many of the elephants would be abandoned if tourists didn't keep them in work, but still we felt a bit guilty.
I think with that in the back of our minds we didn't really enjoy the ride. Although all the elephants looked in good health and the seat was very well padded to protect the elephant, ours was a little unruly and kept wandering off the track to go and eat bananas and the mahout sometimes got a little excited with his training stick, which neither of us were particularly comfortable with. We had lunch at the elephant place which was a little rubbish, they brought all the courses out at once so whilst we ate rice, the flies ate our dessert!!
Next stop was a small hill tribe which we walked up to, our guide was very informative and pointed out flora and fauna along the way. This was a tree that was covered in flowers and there were a few across the forest that made it look almost like autumn:
At the top of the hill we stopped off out our first hill tribe, these people were Thai and had always lived here. The village seemed pretty big, although we only saw a few people as it was getting towards the hottest part of the day and sensibly most of the villagers were taking shelter somewhere cool and so were the animals
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From here we walked onto a local waterfall where we were given the chance to jump in and cool off and have a bit of a swim. Some of the braver (or stupid) members of the group (all the men) also took an opportunity to leap from a rock and land in a very small pool at the bottom..... looking down at where they landed there really wasn't any margin for error a couple of inches one way or the other and you hit a sheer rock face!! None of the ladies jumped.... sensible lot that we are!!
On the walk back from the waterfall, Yo our guide scaled a 10ft banana tree and pushed it over in order to grab the banana flower at the top. We were all slightly in awe of her as she was about a foot smaller than me (yes it is possible to be smaller than me and be an adult) and she demolished the tree very easily. She explained that there were two types of flower one was edible and the other was poisonous.... Although she pointed them both out I couldn't tell the difference between them, so I've decided to steer clear of them whilst I'm here, just incase!
The next stop was our bamboo raft ride down the river although when we got there it looked more like white water rafting than a bamboo raft and that's because it was!! I looked at Michelle she looked at me and we knew that we hadn't booked this!! We had seen tours where you could do it, but we didn't want to as we'd done it in NZ.
Unfortunately we didn't really have much choice in the matter, the only way to carry on with the trek was to go down the river so we donned our broken plastic hats, our ripped life jackets and grabbed our broken oars and jumped in the children's dingy... sorry I mean raft!! Oh yes the other reason we didn't want to do this in Thailand.... the seemingly blatant disregard of any kind of safety standards!!
The first part was OK, very flat and it was just a pleasant cruise along the river.... so pleasant that the Canadian's we were sharing the raft with stopped paddling. The first few rapids were dead easy and I thought if it stays like this it wont be that bad. Unfortunately the rapids got bigger and the guy guiding it was rubbish. He didn't actually guide it at all and we often ended up going sideways or backwards down some large falls. We both nearly fell out about 6 times and were praying for it to be over.
Eventually we pulled up at a bamboo raft and this is where the tour returned to what we had booked we jumped out of the raft and onto the bamboo raft. The guide for this raft didn't even bother guiding he handed the controls over to the Canadian guy and just swam alongside splashing people and getting them completely wet through, which wouldn't have been so bad had we not been fully clothed in our shorts and t-shirts without a dry change of clothes.
The bamboo raft was an 'experience'. It sank so far under the water I was wet past my waist before the bloke virtually fully dunked me in the water!! Eventually I decided to stand rather than sit to try and limit how wet I got!
Back on dry land we were soaked and not best pleased to be honest as we still had another stop off before home. Luckily the weather was warm and by the time we reached our final stop, the long necked hill tribe, we were a little drier.
The place where this tribe live was just gorgeous, we assumed possibly incorrectly that it was too perfect to be natural and that the waterfall cascading through it was man made:
The tribes village at the top of the hill was a little touristic and again a little bit of a let down. The people there were obviously real and truly believed in wearing the neck bracelets, but the whole place felt a bit like these people had just been shipped in and told to sit there whilst people were brought through to look at them. The people who live here are originally from Burma and are supposed to have settled here when the land was under Burmese control before Thailand re-gained the land in a number of conflicts. I guess the people could have lived here although it felt like they rocked up at 8am sat there til 5pm and then went home to watch TV!!
Of course all of the tribes people had little stalls trying to sell things to you and one lady got very upset with us when we looked at one ladies stall, but not her's. She started shouting at us saying we must go and look at her stall and buy something from her. To be fair all of the stalls sold the same stuff so once you'd seen one you'd seen them all so we politely declined although she wouldn't take no for an answer and kept shouting at us as we scuttled away!!
The trip was a bit rubbish to be honest, but despite it all we actually had a brilliant day because the people on the tour were all great company and even though things were a little rubbish we all had a laugh about it anyway.
We met up with a few of the guys later that night for a meal and a couple of drinks.... good times!!
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