where no man has gone before...yeah, right

Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, is about as far from Bangkok as you can get. If Bangkok is the metal metropolis (as my friend Rebecca suggested in her comment on my post about the city), all manic, hard, over-the-top, and relentless, then Chiang Mai is fucking hippie heaven, all organic food, flowy hemp clothing, rasta bars, and "trekking." Trekking, though it sounds like something that only Captain James T. Kirk and crew should undertake, is actually the catch-all term used by Europeans - and so by the Southeast Asian tourist industry catering to them - to describe going out into the jungle and being all outdoorsy. It covers everything from white-water rafting to elephant riding to hiking to remote hilltribe villages - all things that Maya and I did on the "trek" that we took on our second full-day in Chiang Mai. We're definitely not fucking hippies, but we don't mind a bit of adventure.

But if that's what we thought we were getting into, what we got was mostly misadventure; our "trek" was wild, but more because it was a totally half-assed, chaotic tourist safari than because we were actually going out and exploring actual nature. Our tour guide picked us up at our guesthouse at 8:30am - s/he turned out, much to our surprise, to be a particularly thickly-built lady-boy with burly man-hands and huge ankles (that said, her face looked pretty womanly) absurdly juxtaposed with a full range of the most flamboyantly gay gestures you've ever seen. S/he loaded us into a pickup truck with a metal railing, a roof, and two benches installed in the back (this sort of pickup truck-cum-taxi/bus, known as a sawngthaew, are all over Chiang Mai, in addition to the usual car taxis, tuk-tuks, and motobai) and then we drove to another hotel to gather the rest of our trekking group: two guys and one girl from Seattle who had just arrived in Thailand a few days before, an Australian chick who was on the last day of her 3-month journey-home-via-the-world after living in England for 3 years, a German woman (who I know nothing about), and a totally crazy Russian dude who'd just gotten off the overnight-train from Bangkok that morning and jumped right onto this tour with no idea where it was going or what it involved, and without putting on any sort of bug repellant.

The pickup truck roared out through Chiang Mai, and after maybe half an hour, deposited us at an orchid farm, of all things, a stop that had not been on our itinerary, as far as any of us knew. We all wandered around, glancing with vague interest at the alien-looking flowers, wondering what the fuck we were doing here, while our tour guide and the guides from at least three other tours that had just pulled up (none of whom were lady-boys) ate their breakfast under this rather luxurious-looking canopy set up in the middle of the garden. What the fuck, indeed.

We all waited by the truck for our guide to finish eating. S/he finally reappeared, sashaying out from amid the orchids; Maya, who had already had enough, asked him/her what our next stop was. The lady-boy told us, "7-Eleven."

Sure enough, after 10 minutes or so, our truck pulled up to a 7-Eleven (the convenience store franchises, much like KFC in China, are everywhere in Thailand), where our guide bought two bags of chips, and then it was finally off to the jungle, where s/he promised us that we would, first, white-water raft and bamboo raft, then visit the Karen longneck hilltribe, then ride elephants, then hike to a waterfall, and then call it a day.

The road through the jungle was part paved with massive potholes and part not-paved with even more massive potholes, and all of us sitting in the back felt every bump right in our tail bones and whiplashing necks. Our guide meanwhile sat contentedly up in the cabin next to the driver, reading a book - which I joked was probably White Water Rafting for Dummies, much to the horror of the Australian and German chicks, who were both particularly nervous about that portion of our trek. The booking agent in Chiang Mai with whom Maya and I had booked the tour had told us that because the roads into the jungle were so rough, our trek would have to take a truck instead of the air-conditioned van that less adventurous treks take; turned out that our truck was 2-wheel drive anyway, and as we thudded slowly up the road, we watched numerous air-conditioned vans rumble painlessly by us.

Finally our truck pulled over to the side of the road next to some wooden shacks where we saw big white-water rafts set up; our guide got out and shouted at some young Thai boys who seemed to be telling her that they weren't ready for us right now. Clearly pissed off, s/he got back into the truck and we rumbled onto our way to god knows where.

When we pulled over next, our guide explained to us that we would actually be hiking to the waterfall first. So we all tumbled out the back of the truck, stretched our aching bodies, and followed him/her as s/he sashayed up a narrow, crumbly path into the jungle, wearing just his/her flip-flops. After maybe a 15-minute walk, we arrived at probably the most anticlimatic waterfall I've even seen - there are bigger "falls" in the park 10 minutes from my parents' house in Pennsylvania. But the lady-boy seemed very pleased with where s/he'd guided us, and s/he proceeded to urge us to go swimming in the pool at the base of the "fall," which was about the size of a large bathtub. His/her English wasn't great, so s/he mostly urged us on by pointing, moving his/her arms in a swimming motion, and then clapping his/her man-hands excitedly together. None of us made a move towards swimming - Maya and I were definitely not going in because fresh water in Southeast Asia is somtimes known to harbor all sorts of unpleasant bacteria and parasites - except for the Russian dude, who didn't even have a change of clothing with him, as most of us did, but he whipped off his shirt, jumped right in (the pool turned out to be surprisingly deep), and did a couple laps (which basically meant that he lay flat on top of the water one way, then turned around and lay flat in the other direction).

On the way back from the "waterfall," Maya - who was already plenty pissed at how the trek was going so far - slipped on a stepping stone over a tiny creek and totally fell over into the water; fortunately, she caught herself with her hands on a rock, but not before she had completely drenched her sneakers (her one pair of actual shoes) and her pantlegs halfway up the shins and scratched up her knee. Now she was really pissed.

As we continued our walk back to the truck - and as I tried to calm Maya down - the crazy Russian dude ran off the path and up to a banana tree from which he plucked three mini bananas, tossing two to Maya and I. We glanced at them unsure of what to do with these "gifts," while he peeled his and chomped right into it. Our guide looked at him and us with a disturbed expression of his/her face. "Not good to eat," s/he said, shaking her head. The Russian dude spit his mouthful out; we tossed our bananas quickly back into the jungle.

Next stop: white-water rafting, which turned out - somewhat unbelievably, considering all that had come before - to be awesome. We were on a boat with the Australian and German girls, and our "captain," a hilarious hyperactive Thai kid who couldn't have been older than 16 and who tutored us in how to row our craft through the crashing waves and then shouted at us throughout the ride, "Forward! Forward!" "Back! Back!" "Down!!!" We all laughed and screamed as we rode the rollercoaster of the lurching river, and in the middle of the craziest rapids that our boat hit, Maya was fully launched airborn out of her seat and speared my lower back with her helmet-clad head. Like I said, awesome.

Drenched from head to toe after this ride, we moved onto the bamboo-boat riding portion of the trek. If Maya was pissed off before - at the orchid farm, 7-Eleven, her fall, her launch in the white-water - now she was taken to a whole new level of righteous indignation. Steered by standing Thai dudes with long bamboo poles, the bamboo boats didn't even float on top of the surface of the water but rather a good 6-inches below it, meaning that we all had no choice but to sit in the cold and assuredly dirty water (more on that in a bit) for the duration of the ride!Believe it or not, this is us on the so-called "raft"!

Now even more drenched than before - which shouldn't have been possible - we stumbled onto the bank and put on the dry change of clothes we had brought with us (and just about the only other change of clothes we have with us on this whole 4-month trip at all), then we piled back into the truck and went off for lunch - suspiciously tasty pad thai served up under a wooden canopy where skinny cats begged under our tables, head-bobbing chickens stalked around us, and the elephants we were about to ride stomped the earth. We've learned over our travels that there's no rhyme or reason to what food will or will not end up making you ill, and so no surprise here, though this lunch almost certainly should have had us retching, we never did get sick from it.

Elephant riding, which followed our meal, could have been awesome, if the poor beasts hadn't been so brutalized. The elephant Maya and I rode on seemed to be on his last legs, and we quickly fell far behind the rest of our group and their elephants (which we could see dropping ginormous poops right into the river which we had only too recently been riding down and sitting in); the kid sitting on our pachyderm's head in front of us (we sat on a precarious metal carriage somehow attached to the creature's back) egged it on and steered it along the muddy path by kicking his heels into its forehead and slamming a wooden rod with a nasty-looking metal hook on the end into its ears. By the time we had all-too-eagerly disembarked, the elephant had multiple bloody wounds on the sides of its head. Such treatment was particularly shocking since elephants are supposedly considered to be sacred creatures in Thailand. As we drove away I saw the boy with our elephant, bowing to it and saying "Thank you" to it - and then chaining it by its leg to a post.

The last stop on our trek was perhaps the strangest of all and in some ways, the most uncomfortable, but was still definitely a highlight for me: visiting the Karen longneck hilltribe. We hiked for a good 20 minutes into the jungle, crossing numerous streams and passing through banana-tree and bamboo forests. Finally, the shapes of wooden huts appeared from our of the thick foliage ahead.



The village that we entered was tiny (there may have been more of it somewhere deeper in the jungle where tourists are unwelcome) - no more than 10 huts - and there were also no more 10 longneck women and little girls (see below) sitting and standing around.


It was amazing and magical to see these people in person...


but it was also disturbing. I've read online some people describing the experience of visiting the longneck villages as going to "a human zoo"; it didn't feel that wrong and weird to me. But it was hard to know how to act around the tribespeople because the truth is that you were there to stare at them and take pictures of them (which we did only after asking permission from each person), not necessarily as oddities, but kind of... And it was weird how even the most outgoing and talkative members of our group suddenly starting speaking in hushed tones and how tense everyone got. It was hard to know how the longneck people themselves feel about the whole thing. As Maya and I read in our guidebook, the practice of the tribal females wearing those iconic brass rings that seem to stretch their necks (but actually compress their chests) had been dying out until it become apparent that the tribe could make money from it as a tourist draw, which makes any sightseer somewhat complicit in perpetuating what could be considered a deforming tradition. That said, the Karen tribe are refugees from Burma, and the money they earn by opening their villages to tourists may well by the best living they can make, and what they do to their bodies is beautiful in its own way - at least, I think so - and no more deforming than the extreme cosmetic surgery millions of white so-called-civilized westerners inflict upon themselves - so really, who are we to judge?

The one thing I know that I can judge at the end of that day? The trek. Lame.