Something Different Tours in Chiang Mai, Thailand

 You must know where this is going.

The tour guides picked us up from our hotel in a car without a hitch. We went back to their headquarters (which is also now a hostel where you can stay) where we saw their TripAdvisor awards, pictures of them with lots of Westerners, and even some NC State paraphernalia a fellow traveler had left. For once, I took this as a good sign. They loaned us rubber boots (thank God, because they turned out to be a necessity), and we filled out some forms so that they could “make us some insurance” in case anything happened…

Headquarters. Where they make the insurance. See those NCSU cups??

And we’re off!

Immediately Charlie’s nineteen-year-old hellion driver distanced himself from the pack. I was left solo with these two Thai guys and already starting to feel a little nervous zipping through traffic as the only girl in the crowd. Then I saw toddlers riding confidently on motorbikes and I didn’t feel so bad. After we got out of the city and onto less crowded roads, we finally caught up with Charlie and his tour guide. The landscape shifted dramatically and began to look lush and green, full of rice paddies and mountains, so my worries were eased… for the moment.

Yes, I did have to take pictures from the back seat of the motorbike. Just hold on tight with your legs, ease your iPhone out of your pocket, and voila!

How would you like this to be your backyard?

Surprisingly and conveniently, and about as soon as my butt started to hurt, we stopped for snacks and a short walk through a local market in the countryside before heading into the mountains. This wasn’t on the itinerary but I was pumped about it (I love markets!).

We checked out all the food and I found conical hats for less than $2, but they would have surely been a nightmare to transport on my motorbike ride, so sadly I couldn’t buy any. (Sorry dad, one day I’ll buy you one).  I didn’t see any of these damn hats for sale anywhere else during the rest of the trip. (It turns out they aren’t as popular in Thailand as in say Vietnam or China. Please click that link to see that Wikipedia calls them “Chinese Sombreros.” Hilarious.)

Don’t worry, the market looks better on the inside.

I’m a sucker for a good market picture

I loved looking at all of the mystery foods and wandering around watching the salespeople cook. Why can’t I have this in my everyday life?! Lots of other tours stopped by this market on their way up into the jungles for quick refreshments and meals. We bought some waffles in the shape of fish which turned out to be stuffed with chocolate. Our tour guide bought us some rambutan to try after we expressed our curiosity about the hairy fruit and even taught us how to open one. After a quick cig break for the guides, we were off again.

The fruit ladies

My first taste of glorious rambutan.

The roads started getting steeper and windier but hey, at least they were paved. We headed deeper into the hills and onto some dirt paths to check out the elephants. There we ran into some groups of tourists who were doing the same. I’d only read a little bit about the reasons why you shouldn’t ride elephants before we took our trip, but not enough to stop me from doing it. I just wanted to take cool pictures riding on top of an elephant (which I won’t post because I feel shitty about it now).

Since then, I’ve learned about the super sad process that goes into breaking baby elephants in order to get them to allow humans to ride them, including taking them from their mothers at a very young age. Also, despite their size, an elephant’s spine isn’t built to support the weight of a human like a horse’s. Even without this knowledge at the time, I didn’t like the way the man in charge of the elephant we rode followed it around popping it with a slingshot to keep it moving. I knew something wasn’t quite right. When we left our elephant, she was getting chained back up with all the others. I’m very sad we contributed to this cruelty. It’s the tourists that create the demand for this kind of stuff.

Okay, maybe one elephant picture.

So riding the elephant left a bad taste in my mouth. But then we headed out to go bamboo rafting.  Sounds cool right? It was fun, but also a litttttle weird. We left all of our belongings, shoes, and clothes with our guides (we had bathing suits on, we were not naked, that would’ve been really weird). Then an older Thai man who had obviously done this many times steered and paddled us down a shallow brown river on a long bamboo raft using a long stick like a gondolier. I sat in the middle of the raft and Charlie stood and paddled in the back. I looked like a little blonde jungle princess sitting there doing nothing while two men rowed me downstream… though way more awkward and a lot less glamorous. Altogether, this lasted approximately ten minutes and we wouldn’t be dry again for another six hours.

Sorry, couldn’t risk taking the iPhone on a bamboo raft, despite how incredibly sturdy that might sound.

We headed from our raft back up the riverbank where lunch was provided at a little roadside restaurant.  Lots of tables, open air, ladies cooking in woks, just like I like it. We had a spicy minced chicken (or pork?) dish accompanied by rice and our fruit from the market. This was where we discovered mangosteen for the first time, Charlie’s new favorite food in the entire world. It’s sweet, soft, almost citrusy – like if a skittle was transformed into a fruit. After our meal, I pulled the spigot off of the tap trying to wash my hands and caused a minor flood which our tour guide had to come fix. We also declined several enticing (not) offers to buy small trinkets and jewelry, per usual.

Lunch Collage, anyone?

Our next stop was a waterfall.

Finally! A leisurely activity involving swimming and a body of water, something I know how to handle! I was even starting to like my view from the motorbike, and Charlie and I talked about how those lame tourists passing us in vans couldn’t be having nearly as much fun! But wait. You see, I think the trick is to never get too comfortable or too confident while in a foreign country… because as soon as these thoughts entered my mind, everything went straight to hell.

The last of the real roads. (That sign is the biggest understatement of the year)

We knew we were going to Chiang Mai during the rainy season, so we expected some mud. These guys were experts though, right? They wouldn’t take us up the mountains on motorbikes if they weren’t really sure of themselves and the conditions, right? Everybody on TripAdvisor said these guys knew their shit, RIGHT?!

We then began our ascent up the mountains on tiny cliff-side paths. Granted, there were some very beautiful views from these narrow pants-shitting trails which happened to be located terribly un-strategically along the sides of the mountains. Our drivers skillfully drove us up higher and higher via some laughably paved concrete  “roads” that were about ten inches wide. I was so nervous about shifting the bike by moving around even a little bit (and thereby causing my untimely demise) that I didn’t even try to take pictures.

At one point, I even thought man, if we fell just a little to the left here, we would most definitely die.  And do you know when I had that thought?  Approximately two minutes before we actually fell.

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(Stay tuned for Part 2. I have too many pictures and this is just too much writing for one post!)