Chiang Mai

Climbing up to the seventh floor in the forty degree heat, I questioned the worth of getting the cheapest room at the hotel. Each floor is subsequently cheaper as you ascend since there is no elevator and for those who decide that the seventh floor is what their budget dictates, there is no air conditioning either, just to make the lower rooms more attractive. No one else has a room on the top floor, which makes the shared bathroom pretty easy to take and after I booked two-days-worth of tours through the front desk, I got about a 30% discount on my room - from about five dollars to about three dollars. Not too bad. Still, most of the savings goes towards water as I have been sweating buckets at night, laying under the fan and dreaming about Canadian winters.

Yesterday I went on an all-day tour which included a visit to an orchid farm, an elephant ride, a hike into a waterfall where we went swimming, white-water rafting, a bamboo raft ride and a tour of a Burmese hill tribe village. Instead of quality, the tour operators have decided to aim for quantity. The most underwhelming of all of the activities was the the elephant ride, closely followed by the "white-water" rafting. For the elephant ride, I was told that we would have the opportunity to ride on the neck of the elephant and basically bond with it over the course of the morning. Part of the "Getting to Know Your Elephant" included swimming with it in the river and helping the mahout wash it. The reality was a far cry from what was promised. We showed up and were quickly brought over to a raised platform where we hopped on to each elephant in twos. Sitting side-by-side in a tiny raised seat behind the mahout, I and Ling, a Chinese guy in my group, struggled to balance the seat that was leaning precariously to one side. Our mahout didn't speak any English and so was unable to tell us anything about the elephant or being a mahout. Still, our ride was lumbering down to the river, and I was excited to be able to get to help wash it. What the tour operator meant when she said "help wash the elephant" was "stay perched on the back of the elephant as it takes a break at the river to gather some water into its trunks and spray itself." This was a disappointment, but it wasn't a shock as it was for a German couple in our group. Their elephant was considerably more energetic than ours, and spouted equal amounts of mud and water onto itself, though mostly onto the shrieking tourists.

After the elephant debacle and a hike into a waterfall-fed pool, it was time for the white-water rafting. While Thailand has just edged into the rainy season, it has not yet made a difference to the water levels. I admire the perseverance it takes for the raftsmen to continue their operation in the dribble called a river. Our zodiac had five people in it, plus our guide, and by the time the ride ended we were all exhausted. Not from paddling and braving the pounding water, but from continually having to heave ourselves from side to side to extricate the raft from yet another rock that it had gotten hung up on. It was fun enough as we splashed the occupants of other boats as we got jammed on the same series of rocks and laughed at the tedious rate we were making our way downstream.

Today I went into the highlands for a half-day tour through the rain forest, and it turned out to be exactly what it was billed as. Called The Flight of the Gibbon, the tour uses a series of zip-lines to take customers on a two-and-a-half hour trip through the canopy. Sweeping through the branches a hundred or so feet off the ground, it was a great way to see the forest and assumedly get a taste of what it might be like to be a gibbon. The tour is on private land and picks its way through the territory of a family of gibbons; hence the name. While we heard them on occassion, we didn't get to see any. Our leader who takes three tours a day through the trees and has been working there for over a year has only caught sight of a gibbon ten times, so I think we were fortunate just to get close enough to hear them.

Tomorrow I take the overnight train to Bangkok where on Saturday I fly out to Beijing. I got a sleeping berth, so hopefully it will be an easier trip than the overnight bus I took earlier in my trip.