Having survived a 6 hour bus ride to Chiang Mai, we arrived in time for bed! Saturday morning we were picked up for our 3 day Trek. 1st stop was a local market to pick up supplies. We went for a wonder and came across some pretty strange things, including a bowl full of live frogs!! We then got dropped off with our 2 guides at our starting point. In total their were 9 of us in our group, with 2 guides, Jo Jo and Mr Son. We walked about 12km that first day, stopping to see huge tarantulas, scorpions, paddy fields and to have lunch in a village. That night we stayed with a hill tribe, where we were introduced to "holly water" (rice whiskey) which was nasty - opium was also in abundance!
The following morning we said goodbye to 4 members of our group, as they were only doing the one night hike and also to Jo Jo, who had to take them back. Mr Son led us on our way. We did another 12km and hiked up a mountain, before making our way through paddy fields, to an impressive waterfall, where we were to spend our final night. That evening we saw the night away playing cards and drinking beer, having spent a good few hours swimmming in the waterfall.
On the last day of the trek we only walked about 6km, stopping at 2 other waterfalls for a swim. After lunch, we went on an elephant trek which lasted about an hour. Our elephant was extremely stubborn and refused to walk unless we fed it bananas. It them proceeded to fart the rest of the trek. After we'd said goodbye to the elephants, we were taken to a river, where we went rafting. Our 'driver' took us through some pretty cool rapids, which he later got told off for, as everyone else was told to get off their raft for that bit! We returned to Chiang Mai cream crackered!!

Today our guide Mr Son had the day off, so he offered to take us around Chiang Mai. He took us to an orchid and butterfly farm, which was pretty, but not all that exciting. He then took us to a snake farm, where they put on a show with lots of snakes and found great pleasure in scaring the absolute crap out of us, by throwing poisonous snakes at us!! We then saw a Buddhist temple in the woods, which was pretty cool and then the oldest temple in Chiang Mai.