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Tour date: June 1998.

Backpacking in Thailand - North

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-17 14:00:41

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Laos, and Myanmar (formerly Burma) meet is called the Golden Triangle, a supposedly beautiful area but rather far away, and an excursion takes many days so I chose something closer to Chiang Mai. I ended up with an excursion by Panda Tours (phone 278296) that included elephant riding, river rafting, and hiking up some hills to visit mountain tribes and see waterfalls.

Elephants are used as work animals in rural Thailand, carrying timber or doing heavy farmwork. They are a tourist staple too. They mount a wooden saddle on an iron frame on the back for two people to sit, while the driver, a small boy in my case, sits right on the bare head of the elephant, guiding it with his feet behind the elephant's ears. Elephants walk with slow, pondering, pounding steps, up and down hills on narrow paths. We rode for an hour until we got to the end of the trail.

From there, we continued hiking up the hill to visit hill tribes. That's what they call them; they are really immigrants from adjoining poorer countries trying to get Thai citizenship. I was assured that they don't mind being gawked at by tourists... They live in primitive huts built from roughly cut wood and palm leaves, but not so primitive that they wouldn't sell Coca Cola to thirsty tourists or watch TV. We visited several; it was a fairly long hike involving several shaky wicker-and-bamboo bridges like the one on the left.

We also passed some small rivers and a waterfall, where some people went swimming. The water is very warm, but in some places, especially still water, one can catch quite interesting diseases such as small worms that burrow through the skin and swim to the liver where they live happily everafter, so I skipped that opportunity.

The final item on the agenda was river rafting. The rafts were built from bamboo, tied together with old bicycle tires. There was a guide standing in front who guides the raft through the faster sections of the river with a long pole, and two or three tourists, one of whom stands in the rear with another pole. Water levels were fairly low so there were no difficult rapids, but there were large boulders and sand banks we had to maneuver around. In one place we got stuck and had to get off into the water, and then collided in mid-stream with the next raft...

Rafting on a small river through the jungle is great fun. It's not a jungle in the Tarzan sense, but there are dense forests, mangroves, ferns, and reed; with birds and small animals everywhere. Snakes, too; we saw one. They are small but poisonous. We were warned that it would get wet, but compared to true white-water rafting it was slow and quiet.

This excursion was certainly worth its cost ($20). It was fairly short, but travel agencies in Chiang Mai offer anything from half-day to week-long tours, from seeing some wat somewhere to hiking through the forests of the Golden Triangle. Some day I'll come back and spend more time here. Chiang Mai was the best part of the entire trip.