Start Trekkin'

On Monday 27 Feb we set off early to begin our trek, an hour-and-a-half's ride away in the back of a roofed flat-bed truck (locally called a 'songthaew'). Apart from our two Thai guides, Pon and Phim, we were accompanied by a Japanese student called Do-Hai, a young bloke called Tony from Harrogate and his Thai girlfriend Boiya (no idea if I've spelt these correctly; apologies).

Our first stop was by a river to partake in a very pleasureable ride on a bamboo raft.

Thankfully, we're visiting during the 'dry' season and so white-water shenanigans were minimal, although there were a couple of 'interesting' moments negotiating rocky parts of the river!

After the gentle introduction, we started the trek proper with a two-and-a-half-hour uphill hike to our destination for the evening, the Waterfall Camp.

The hike took us through beautiful scenery such as the paddy fields and Lychee groves seen here:

and on up through forested hillside and sun-dappled glades (poetic, innit?), past rocky streams and pools teaming with fish. It sounds idyllic, and it was apart from the heat which meant that we had to stop regularly to catch our breath, take down litres of water, and admire each other's sweat sodden attire.

And so it was with great relief that we reached the Waterfall Camp. By this time everyone was dying to take a cool shower, and -guess what? - here it is!:

Our accommodation for the night was a large dormitory on stilts constructed from wood and bamboo, and provisioned with bedding rolls, blankets and mosquito nets.

We shared the camp with another group of trekkers, with all the guides taking care of the catering, and rustling up a pretty good meal of soup, fried rice and pineapple. Our guide Pon provided a little extra snack... he'd found a honeycomb which contained some fully grown but dormant bees and invited us to eat one each! It was too much for Sharon, but I thought "why not?" and dutifully ate my bee (and yes, I did chew it!) It was a bit crunchy, but not particularly tasty.

Heartened by this, Pon then produced some bee larvae for us to eat; this was a step too far for all of us but Do-Hai - he ate the lot (but then, he'd already eaten a whole scorpion at a restaurant in Vietnam and proudly showed us the photo).

The evening was rounded off with copious amounts of SamSong Thai rum sitting around a roaring camp fire in pitch darkness...