Chiang Mai, apparently the no 2 city in Thailand. Quite a nice chilled out place (although still very hot despite all the claims of it being the cool north!) with lots of bookshops and temples, and a system of canals running round the Old City. We were delivered straight off our overnight bus, bleary eyed and desperate to just lie flat somewhere, to a guesthouse where they plied us with tea and immediately started off on a sales pitch to try and sell us a trek. Rather disgruntled about not having had a choice about where we disembarked we (drank their tea and) left, with the guide's warnings that we would have a horrible time if we booked a trek with someone else ringing in our ears.

We booked a trek with someone else. It was cheaper and there were less people fighting over it. In hindsight the over-the-top guide might have been right, as some parts of the advertised features on our trek were skimmed over rather - the elephant ride was cursory and we didn't even get a photo of us on it, plus our 'homestay with the Hilltribes' was just us in a hut near a village- we didn't even see any Hill tribers (apart from an old lady who wanted to give us all a massage - shudder!). However we certainly didn't have a horrible time, we enjoyed it a lot.

We set off on the first day of walking after being whipped on and off the elephants and carted across a river in a cage (all very Indiana Jones!), to find that we were going at a mighty pace up a very steep hill and we were doing so for about 3 hours! Cal was worried that she might actually die before nightfall - simultaneously Matt was thinking how much fun this all was and how nice it was to be a bit stretched for a change.

We stopped halfway for a rest by a murky looking waterfall and splashed and huffed and puffed a bit until we felt a few less degrees like imploding just from the heat. Thankfully from there on the guides seemed to feel the pace a little too and every so often stopped on the vertical slopes for a chat about jungle fruits or bizarre legends about banana trees and their ghosts - each time just seconds before Cal was about to slip into a coma! Later the guide informed us that we were all very ood walkers and we'd gone twice as fast as we needed to - thus endangering his life by these words!

As we neared our bamboo hut for the first night the clouds started to gather over the hills and it cooled down. Some members of the group also spotted a huge potentially poisonous snake which apparently was good luck to have seen (?!) and inspired the guides to whack sticks around trying to scare it out of hiding so we could all share the joy. How sensible. At that moment a tarantula like spider crawled out of one of the many holes in the earth to see what all the noise was. It was going to be a fun night!

We'd just made it into the hut, muddy, sweaty, and gulping down Coke from glass bottles when the rain set in and thundered down - and the wind threw right back into the open part of the hut. We all had to take shelter in the bedroom area and huddle together in a corner - one way to achieve group bonding with a group of sweaty strangers anyway!

The hut was perched on the hillside in a village and was made entirely of bamboo with some very large gaps in places, particularly the floor! It was quite cosy though and reminded us of being in Africa. We sat around in the evening with candles (once the rain and wind had died down) and were entertained by local boys who could do all things imaginable with a piece of string! We had hoped to see a bit of the village but settled for chatting to our fellow trekkers instead.

The next two days' walking was a breeze, barely walking for more than an hour a day and almost all downhill with lots of stops. We stopped for a bit in another hillside village apparently inhabited by Chinese people who were very rich. Inside the wooden and bamboo huts each family had a home theatre and all mod cons apparently. Sadly all the men of the village had recently been jailed for drugs offences relating to tourists (didn't get the details) and they'd all be in for 10 years. Without the wage earners the women were left running things and the wealth was draining away.

We swam in waterfalls, walked through groves of swaying bamboos (and felt like we were in House of Flying Daggers) stayed another night in a little camp by the river and then on the last day went white water rafting. Well, brown water. We all sqeezed into a little dinghy after a sketchy run down by the two guides whose English was interesting and who we couldn't really hear, and we were off! Our first rapid must have only had about a metre and a half of space where the water rushed between the huge rocks before it dropped considerably to the river below. Our boat was at least 3 metres long and we took the rapid side on. The boat folded in half, a juicy sandwich with all of us in the middle mashed into each others backs and faces, we ground through the channel, bounced down to the water below and wondered if we were all still in one piece - it seemed we were! That was only the beginning. Needless to say once again Cal looked death in the face and Matt thought it was all rather fun!

After the rollercoaster of the rapids (admittedly some parts were very slow and more like a British rail train) we stepped onto a bamboo raft which was surprisingly sturdy but didn't appreciate having 7 passengers, and between us we navigated a rather more serene stretch of river. All was well until the front punters stopped paying attention and we hit the bank with a big judder! Passengers stumbled wildly and a small pale Canadian one got rather bruised poor thing. Nonetheless we made it back to the shore and sat in a hut eating lychees fresh off the tree by the kilo until it was time to head back to Chiang Mai.

After a few more days in Chiang Mai we considered our next step and decided we needed more info that only Bangkok could give us, so it was back on that overnight bus!