Chang Mai (contd)

When in Chang Mai, we decided to take a 2 day/1 night trek. It was a 2 hour ride in a truck to get to the elephant camp that was the starting point of the trek. We stopped off after about an hour on the truck at a market. It was there that I spotted this. I don't know how many fish were in this tub but there wasn't much room for anymore. The lady you can see at the top right was taking fish out, one at a time, and gutting them. About as fresh as you can get!

The first part of the trek consisted of an elephant ride, which was amusing, if a little slow. We did get to fed the elephants - they're hungry buggers. They didn't even give us a chance to peel the bananas for them!

After leaving the elephants, we had a 2 hour up-hill walk to the village we were going to be staying in for the night. Barry wasn't feeling the May-West (he'd been sick the night before) and to add to his woes his "The North Face" sandals, bought because they would be durable, broke. It was only a strap and we managed to make a DIY repair job but he wasn't pleased! Anyway, that evening, a number of local kids came and sand a few songs for us...at least I'm presuming it was a few. They never actually stopped singing for the ten minutes they were there! We all got the impression that they had done it so often that they had become completely bored with the whole thing.

Here's a picture of the crew the next morning after about one hour of walking. Left to right: Barry, Megan (Canada), Krista (Canada), Oscar (Italy), Fabien (Switzerland), Stefano (Italy) and Lee, our guide.

Here we are at the place we had lunch on the second day (Oscar took the picture).

The trekking on the secong day was the best. We had to follow a stream down the mountain so we were continually crossing over and back. It was relatively exerting but very enjoyable. Here I am (with my trusty bamboo stick - I now know why walkers use sticks: they're bloody handy) in front one of the waterfalls we passed on our journey down. After we stopped walking, we did a little white-water rafting (no much white-water unfortunately) and we completed our journey on a semi-submerged bamboo raft.