Seth and I have decided that it’s time for a real vacation! We’ll be in Thailand for 2 weeks. The first leg: a 3-day trek around the Mae Hong Son area. We got to Thailand early Thursday morning, then took a van from Chiang Mai to the city of Mae Hong Son that day. A brief night’s sleep in the hotel and we were ready to go. This is 3 days of memories guys, so settle in!

 

Here’s the video of the experience that I put together. Although there’s certainly much more explanation in the post, videos certainly add another whole element.

 

A shot of Wat Jong Klang in Mae Hong Son taken the night before our trek

 

We woke up on Friday morning at 7, finished packing our backpacks, and stuck our suitcase in reception for the weekend. Soon we would be off on a jungle adventure! As recommended by the website through which we booked the trek (Active Thailand), in our bags were:

We waited in the lobby for our guide to pick us up at 8. Around 8:05, a little white Toyota Camry from the ’90s drove up and out popped 4’11” stocky Thai woman around 50. “Are you fo trekking?” she asked. We replied yes, and she introduced herself as Shan (like Shawn, which was confusing, but is also the name of a local ethnic group in Northern Thailand, to which Shan does not belong. Also confusing). “I will be your guide this day.” I was a little surprised — in previous experience, our guides have been younger and male, but this was a new country and a new experience! We were ready to take on Northern Thailand.

 

We hopped in Shan’s car and headed away from the hotel, at which point she told us that there were “2 more” she needed to pick up. Those two more turned out to be a very nice Swiss couple in their 50s from outside Zurich. She is a minister who works as a spiritual advisor to the sick, and he is a musician who also gives lessons. We were lucky enough to witness some of his musical skills on the trek, too.

 

Shan drove the four of us crammed in her little car to a small village rampant with chickens just outside Mae Hong Son. She gave us some big bottles of water to add to our bags, and introduced her brother-in-law, who was carrying an enormous white bag — which we later would learn was carrying all of our food for 2.5 days. We all walked to a river and hopped into a canoe and traveled down the river through the mist, passing beautiful mountains crisscrossed with rice paddies and full of huge banana trees and jungle.

The ride was short, and on the other side of the river we hopped out and started our trek through a farm of people who live off their own land: She showed us rice, garlic, red berries, corriander, chickens, and even an avocado tree — what else could you want (besides a cow or goat for cheese, obviously)? The family also had a lot of dogs, and showed us some of their instruments — a cowbell, a drum, and some cymbals, which they proceded to play while the woman from Switzerland sang for a few minutes. It was a great, optimistic way to start off the trek!

 

 

 

From the farm, we made our way across Hui Hoc valley through springs. Seth and I, who haven’t been on a trek in years and, cursed with large Western feet, couldn’t find well-fitting hiking shoes in China, thought it was a grand idea to just wear old sneakers and then throw them away after we were done. (Wow, what a terrible decision. We will be buying hiking boots before the next trek.) I am sure that the first day, which was about 50% walking along a riverbed, my Nike Frees (read: thin sole and lots of pores for air) got dunked about 4 times each when I tried to step on a rock and failed. It wasn’t pretty. My feet and socks were saturated. But our first morning in the jungle was gorgeous and we got our first taste of a real bamboo forest, and saw baby bananas growing off the huge, endless banana trees. There were leaves the size of me (literally) that people sometimes use for umbrellas in the rainy season, and Shan would stop and tell us about different plants with medicinal uses. She also showed us berries of another tree that make you a bit drunk if you eat them. She said sometimes elephants get “drunk” off this berry together! She also stopped to chop some bark off a tree, which she would later boil in water inside some bamboo to make a tea which would give us energy.

 

 

 

 

We stopped for lunch at a waterfall, where Shan’s brother-in-law had stopped ahead of us and had already created 6 cups with young bamboo and his machete: one for him, one for Shan, and 4 for the trekkers. He also made some spoons out of bamboo with his machete! (Talk about bio-degradeable cutlery…)

He had a fire going, which Shan used to cook tea in some bamboo. She did this the same way that her brother-in-law had made the cups: by taking a piece of bamboo and cutting it off right below a segment, where there’s a break in the otherwise totally hollow plant. She put some water in the bamboo and then some of the bark she had cut during the trek, then stuck the bamboo in the fire. Since the rainy season had just finished, the bamboo had enough water to not burn. You could hear the water boiling inside. Otherwise we had chicken and rice with cucumbers and a nice soy and chili sauce from a restaurant that Shan had stopped by that morning. After a brief swim and drying off in the sun, we continued on our way through the jungle to our first stop for the night.

 

 

 

The first waterfall, and Shan’s brother-in-law making bamboo tools

The place of our first sleep on the trek was a 3 to 4,000-year-old cave. We had to climb up (Mom, you would not have wanted to watch me get up there) and inside was indeed a flat surface big enough for about 4 people, covered with large dry banana leaves.

 

 

 

It was just high enough for us to stand on our knees, with sandstone or limestone that had been eroded on the ceilings. Dinner was cooked exactly the way the tea had been cooked: in bamboo on the fire, but this time, it was all the food. Shan soaked the sticky rice in water from a nearby stream before putting it in bamboo that was still fresh from the rainy season. She explained that February is the last month for eating sticky rice like that, because the bamboo won’t have the right consistency in the dry season (which lasts until July). We each got a piece of bamboo that was about a foot and a half long and filled with sticky rice that had been sitting on the fire for an hour. After scraping off the charred outer layer with a machete, we peeled the bamboo away like a banana to find an inner cylindar of bamboo about an inch in diameter. We broke off pieces and dipped it in the 3 different kinds of soup that Shan had also cooked in different pieces of bamboo: one chicken in Tom Yum broth with eggplant, a chicken curry, and an eggplant soup. It was all delicious, and Shan put aside a little bit of sticky rice and soup in a banana leaf with incense for the spirit of the valley, too. We ate in the dark on the jungle floor off a fresh banana leaf longer than me, and Shan and her brother-in-law used half pieces of bamboo stuck into the leaf to light our dinner by candle. What an amazing night.

I wish I could say that, with full bellies, we had a restful night’s sleep in the cave. But we did not.

 

 

 

As it turns out, caves are not comfortable places to sleep. The few hours of light sleep I did get were disastrous, and I would wake up with a sore hip or in a bad position every half hour or so. But the next morning I was awoken by incense that Shan had lit in a little section of the cave underneath us to honor the spirit of the cave. She served another amazing meal of scrambled eggs with vegetables, soup, an avocado the size of my head, bamboo sprouts, “energy” bark tea, and more delicious sticky rice cooked in bamboo.

Our trek the second day was harder. We trudged up a beast of a mountain called Bangkop. Hiking along the ridge at the top, we could see the borderline to Myanmar and the mountains over on the Burmese side. Shan told us more about the flora in the area, and explained that her brother is an herbalist in Chiang Mai who knows over 1,000 different kinds of plants. She told us, “most people take chemicals, but they don’t know that you can use things in the jungle.” She cured herself of Dunghee fever as well as kidney stones from medicine she got from the jungle. She also told us about the teak trees in Thailand. If you haven’t heard of teak, it’s a very popular wood used to make furniture, and used to be over-farmed in the area. It’s a heavy wood that lasts a long time and is generally avoided by termites, making it quite desireable. About 40 years ago, however, Thailand closed the teak industry to outsiders, and since then the teak population has flourished. A feel-good story.Our lunch the second day was cooked in a cast-iron pale by Shan’s brother-in-law: a green curry with chicken, vegetables, little rice noodles, and of course, sticky rice cooked in bamboo. After finishing off our sticky rice supply, we continued down the mountain into another valley where we would sleep that night. The terrain was rocky and full of vines that liked to grab your ankles as you carefully walked down. This is where I reallly wished I had better shoes, since the old running shoes I kept losing traction. I also kept getting caught in the vines and slipping on the loose gravel and leaves littering the path, and fell on my butt at least 15 times.

 

 

 

When we finally got to the bottom, we headed through rice paddies and farms to our stop for the second night: Shan’s other brother-in-law (there were a lot of family connections here that I didn’t quite get) and his wife, an older couple who are of the Shan people, who live on a little farm with rice paddies, banana trees, a bunch of chickens, and about 10 sweet doggies whose job it was to keep the snakes away. We washed our trekking clothes in a nearby stream, then settled into our lodgings for the night: the family’s rice barn. The woman set up four bed pads and little pillows under a mosquito net for the four of us to sleep (we all agreed that it was lucky we got along!) and spent the next few hours watching the dogs and the chickens play while taking in the beauty of the isolated place.

We had another wonderful dinner with rice from their farm, pieces of one of the chickens rubbed in a curry, fried rice noodles with vegetables, some spicy green beans, and a new bark tea (the old man’s favorite) that we watched Shan gather from a tree that appeared to bleed red when she cut it. That night, far away from civilization and light pollution, and close to the lunar new year with no moon in the sky, I saw the brightest stars in my life and really felt like we were under a dome. The only thing obstructing our view were the few palm trees on the property, which cast a black shadow on the star-filled sky. We drank tea and listened to Shan’s stories of different stars, like the chicken stars: the little ones around the big stars. The story goes that back when the Buddha was still alive, he was going to a town, and the townsfolk wanted to honor him by killing the biggest hen they had. The hen overheard them talking, then told all her chicks that she was going to die the next day. She told each of them what they were to do when she was gone. Then, when she was killed the following day, all of her babies went under the fire as she was being cooked. Those chicks went into the sky and are now known as the chicken stars!

Try not to think of the story as sad while staring at this sweet little family of chickens

With full bellies, we did not sleep much better in the cold rice barn. I definitely fell asleep faster, but the couple had at least 3 roosters that started to crow well before dawn, around 4AM. Despite my ear plugs, I was in and out until about 7, when I gave up and went outside to find our clothes still drenched from their bath in the river. Shan and her relatives were cooking breakfast, which they served up around 10: rice from their farm, Tom Yum soup, salad with a curry and vinegar dressing, toast with honey and butter, and local fruit including papaya, small bananas bursting with flavor (and huge seeds), and little tangerines.

 

 

 

Our last trekking day also included a mountain that did not seem like it was going to end. We swam through a beautiful waterfall, ate lunch, and then finished off in the Red Karen village, a place that can only be described in pictures.

 

 

 

It was one of the most picturesque scenes I’ve ever witnessed. Our Swiss friends treated us to some victory ice cream, which was the perfect ending to a long journey.

 

Shan asked us if we were interested in some hot springs, to which we all enthusiastically agreed. She drove us to a village about a half hour away (everything was in Thai, so I have no idea where we were) and the four trekkers rented a room where we relaxed in the big warm bath for an hour.

 

We got back to our hotel and slept for 10 hours after a long shower. I’m sure we could have slept another 10, but it was time to catch our flight for the next leg of our trip: Chiang Mai!

 

So I write this as I sit in the Chiang Mai airport sipping on my first coffee in 3 days. It’s called a “black canyon,” which I can only assume is stronger than an Americano. Soon we’ll drop off our stuff at our hotel and then head out to soak in the city. TTFN!