I came up to Chiang Mai, in the heart of Northern Thailand via 13 hour bus - the trains have stopped running due to the worsening civil unrest. The bus driver assured me that once the vehicle was running, the bathroom would be unlocked - I've never believed in magic, and have endured many an Asian bus ride on busses with locked toilets, avoiding laughter and sometimes conversation entirely, clutching my explosive bladder for dear life, so I don't know why I thought this would be any different. Lies. House of lies. The door was locked but about an hour into the trip, the bus started halting to a stop every hundred metres, and I figured that the driver was either distributing our backpacks to needy people on the side of the superhighway, or stopping to relieve himself (I was no fool, I'd seen the empty cans of Singha accumulating under his seat) but luckily for me he was indeed resolving the bathroom dilemma and the rest of the ride was a breeze.
I'm teamed up with Steph again, and while we haven't been robbed or scratched by stray dogs this time around, so far we have seen a Muay Thai boxing show, the highlight of which was the "Special Show", consisting of blindfolded teenagers going at each other and also at the ref. We've taken a trip out to an organic farm and learned how to cook tasty Thai dishes, but our most noteworthy adventure as of yet has certainly been our "eco" trek through the Thai jungle - we rode an elephant named Bountia, who refused to move forward unless fed a banana every twenty seven seconds, and endured a rigorous 4 hour climb up a giant mountain. We camped out for the night with the Lahu village tribe and met Jack, local funny man, who showed us many games, most of which involved rubbing the charcoal from the bottom of a dirty wok all over our faces.
Bountia
Jack Sparrow
In the morning we hiked down to a waterfall. "No ploblem!" our guide, Moonshine, had told us the night before. "Tomorrow easy. All downhill!" Oh my Buddha. I spent the morning with my eyes glued to my crappy Puma sneakers and tried not to fall. "Too SLOW!" Moonshine's brother, Good, told me, and dragged me screaming through the mud behind him. I rinsed the mud out of my crevices in the waterfall, and then followed the stream to the starting point of my next adventure - whitewater rafting, which, for the record, rocks, even if all normal safety measures aren't necessarily in place.
In short, Thailand is pretty cool. Tourism is a mixed blessing here, and I feel a lot of sadness towards the hungry baby elephants that they force to walk around the streets in order to extort money from rich white people, and am still processing my feelings about visiting the hill tribe - it's amazing how our money serves to both preserve and completely destroy their culture, at the same time. So far Steph and I have avoided evils such as leeches, dengue fever, and obnoxious British law students, but tomorrow we head towards Laos, and it is a whole new day.
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