We got up early the next morning and packed our bags up as we had decided to treat ourselves to an air conditioned room for the night after our trek, having found the fan room we'd been in just slightly too warm during the night. We left the bags in our room and headed downstairs for a quick breakfast, then the guide from our trek turned up to pick us up. A pair of English girls, Courtney and Holly, and a New Zealand couple, Chris and Vashti, were also going on the trek from our guest-house, so we all piled into the back of the sawngthaew that would take us around that day. We set off and picked up some more people at other guest-houses : Teamm, a Thai guy and his friend Robbie, and Jen, an American girl.

With the group complete we set off from Chiang Mai bound for our first stop, an elephant ride. Along the way we all got chatting, including our guide Lanna who spoke great English. Chris the Kiwi for some reason mentioned picking up a bottle of whisky from a shop and, in a surprising move Lanna agreed, jumping out at a shop on our way out of town. Therefore we ended up all drinking sang som and coke on the way to our trek at about 9am. This was to set the tone for much of the day.

It was fun riding out the highway sipping on a whisky though I stuck to just one drink and Lucy abstained, knowing we had a fairly busy day ahead of us. However, Chris and Vashti along with Lanna the guide got stuck into the drink, making a fair dent in the bottle before we arrived about 40 minutes later at the elephant riding place, some distance out of town along a dirt road off the main road.

We all piled out of the truck here and were soon introduced to our steeds, some ex-logging elephants now employed to lumber around a muddy track in the jungle with tourists on their back. I felt a bit sorry for the elephants but I'm sure their life giving tourists rides was better than dragging tonnes of logs through the jungle.

We got a chance to feed the elephants, who were coming up to the raised wooden platform we were going to use to mount them and laying their trunks along it in hope of a snack. It was fascinating watching them grab bananas out of our hands and curl them into their mouths using their trunks. We had seen elephants before but were still surprised by their size up close, particularly when we had to step on their heads (Which we did gently hoping not to hurt the poor beasts).

Once we had all gotten on our elephants, sitting either in double seats mounted on their backs or on their necks as I started out, we set off along a path down towards a river. I felt a bit wobbly and unstable so high up on the elephant's neck so I soon scrambled back and joined Lucy in the seat on our elephant's back for the rest of the ride.

We rode down a muddy path to the river, along it, then cut into the jungle up a steep winding track in foot-deep mud which would have been a nightmare to walk through. It was amazing how the elephants picked a path and walked up the steep slopes without slipping or stumbling. For such big creatures, they weren't very clumsy. There were a few moments where we were a bit worried however, such as when one elephant (Courtney and Holly's) walked right up to the edge of a very steep drop to get at a delicious-looking branch.

We soon arrived back at the platforms after our loop through the jungle and dismounted, only to find that Lanna had disappeared during our ride and picked up ANOTHER bottle of sang som. This he cracked open while we sat having a lunch at the elephant riding place of fried rice with chicken. We both declined the drink this time, deciding it was still a bit early in the day to be drinking quite so much. Once again this didn't stop Chris, Vashti and Lanna who got stuck into the 2nd bottle as we re-boarded the pick-ups to go to our next stop, the start of our walk through the jungle.

Chris and Lanna thankfully hopped on top of another pick-up to make the journey on the roof, leaving the rest of us in peace to bump along the potholed dirt road winding above a river far below, until we eventually pulled over at the start of our trek. We all piled out again and set off on the walk, initially across an open field surrounded by towering slopes of dense jungle with mountains behind us in the distance, before entering the jungle and following a narrow winding path climbing through the trees alongside a river.

The walk was really good fun, as we made our way up through the jungle through the incredible vegetation, crossing streams over wobbly logs, past huts of bamboo and grass propped on stilts which had catapults and stones to fire at hanging bottles. The path was well trodden and we saw a number of groups going in both directions but that's what we'd expected on a 1 day touristy trek, so we weren't bothered. It was just good to get out of the town and see the landscape, so different to that back home, up close.

Eventually after winding our way up through the jungle, through cracks in rocks, across more high log bridges and past one massive spider which Lucy was inexplicably happy to stand right beside for a photo (inexplicable because she is normally frozen by fear at the sight of the smallest spider) we arrived at our destination, the waterfall.

The waterfall was lovely, pouring down from rocks high above us into a pool enclosed almost completely around by steep cliffs. The spray was lovely and cooling, but the best part was when we got in the water. Splashing around in the cool refreshing pool was great after sweating through the jungle for an hour or so. There were a lot of groups at the waterfall when we arrived but they gradually disappeared leaving the whole place just to our group. As it was mid-afternoon now, I decided it would be okay to have another drink so partook in some more sang som and coke as we larked about in the waterfall pool for a while.

Eventually it was time to get out and get dried off, before we set off back down the path, retracing our route to the pick-up truck. Along the whole walk, up and back, Chris Vashti and Lanna had been drinking and were all rather drunk by the time we got back to the truck. In fact Lanna looked like he had gone past being drunk and was almost hungover, at about 2 in the afternoon. I can't say we had any sympathy for them though!

Once back at the pick-up we were driven a bit down the road to the point where we would start our white water rafting. The previous night it had been raining really heavily (We had heard it battering down outside our windows in the guest-house almost all night) so the river was quite high and swollen, the brown water churning its way down the valley. Lucy, who hadn't been keen on the idea of the rafting in the first place, was really put off when she saw the river but she decided to give it a shot and we got our life jackets, helmets and paddles and had a briefing before launching our boats into the river.

Almost immediately, we were plunged into quite a ferocious rapid which I found fantastic fun but Lucy found terrifying. After the rapid, we pulled the boat over to the side to wait for the rest of our group and Lucy just sat hugging her knees in the middle of the boat, too scared to think about doing any more rafting. We got the guides to shout to one of our pick-ups passing on the road above and it stopped, then Lucy and I scrambled up the hill to the truck. After making sure the guy in the truck was from our group, I left Lucy with the driver to meet us at the finish point, and scrambled back down the slope to the boat.

We then continued down the fast-flowing brown river, alternating between churning rapids and calm sections where we could jump out of the raft and splash around. The scenery around the river was great, with jungle-covered hillsides all around. As we floated down one of the calm sections, we suddenly heard urgent shouts from the bank telling us to swim to the edge. We all managed to swim across the current and scrambled out onto the bank. I was a bit disappointed, thinking this was the end of the rafting, as it had come not long after starting. However, we soon found out we were skipping the next part of the river as it was too dangerous to raft with the water so high. I'm glad they'd shouted to us in time to swim to the bank before we'd floated into that part of the river!

What followed was a lengthy gap between rafting as we got the boats out of the water, onto pick-up trucks, walked to the next part of the river, and got the boats in the water again. The reason it took so long was that about 5 other groups of tourists were doing the same thing, with only a couple of places where the boats could be launched from. Eventually though, we got back on the river and rode the last few sections of rapids before jumping into the water and floating on our backs through the trees looking up at the sky until we reached the end point and a relieved-looking Lucy standing on the bank.

After drying off and getting our stuff sorted out, our group got back in the pick-up, armed with more booze, and we set off back towards Chiang Mai. This time most of us had a drink or two as we drove back through the lush green countryside, stopping for a bit at a beautiful area of rice paddies amongst the verdant hills before getting back on the highway and heading back to town. On the way Lanna informed us that instead of dropping us back at our guest-houses, he was going to treat us all to dinner at a bar in town. We protested, saying we'd go for dinner but pay our own way, and so we ended up at a bar in a small backstreet in Chiang Mai a short while later.

We all ordered Chiang Mai noodles as Lanna wanted us to try the local speciality, and he said the chef at this place made the best in town. The food was tasty, but I have to say not as good as the Chiang Mai noodles we'd made ourselves at the cookery class the day before!

We were keen to stay with our group from the trek, as we'd mostly all gotten on well during the day, but we felt bad that we'd arranged to get in touch with Simone and Kai, the German couple we'd met on the train. However, we hadn't brought a phone on the trek so had no way to get in touch. Originally we were only going to have one drink at the bar but we ended up having so much fun we stayed most of the night, still in our damp and dirty clothes from the trekking and river-swimming.

We ended up playing Jenga at the table, as well as a fantastic dice game called Jackpot which we played for drinks, with the loser buying a big beer or cocktail to share between the other players. The bar's owner, Chai, was a really nice guy and joined in with us drinking and playing games, letting us choose music to play from Youtube on the computer in the bar's corner.

Hours after arriving at the bar, we finally decided to call it a night and, after paying our share of the bill at the bar (Some of our group having disappeared without paying earlier, namely a couple of drunken New Zealanders who ordered buckets of sang som). The remainder of our group from Green Tulip along with Jen the American girl, who we'd persuaded to come and stay at our guest-house since it was so good, piled into one tuk tuk and directed the bemused driver to take us home. After waking the lovely owners of the guest-house to let us in (Which we felt bad about but they must be used to as they lock the doors quite early and probably have a lot of guests coming home late) we made our way up to our new room. We found the room on the top floor and couldn't believe how nice it was, spotlessly clean with a big comfy bed, big patio doors opening onto a rooftop terrace, and air conditioning. Very happy, we crashed out for the night, having had a rather crazy but fun-filled day.