Monks and Mountains

After Kanchanaburi, we took a night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai (this was part of our comparative night train study: for comfort, Thai trains definitely take the prize, but they don't come anywhere near Indian trains for food and general entertainment!) Chiang Mai is a relatively small, very pleasant town in the north of Thailand, full of temples, surrounded by a square moat and beyond that, mountains. All of these temples means of course many monks, all walking about the town in their bright orange robes, usually in groups, or hanging out at the Wat (temple). What really intrigues me is that they are often very young, in their twenties, but sometimes even as young as 10! So one day, we went to a temple where they had Monk Chat:
J-F went in the morning and the girls and I in the afternoon. We spent at least two hours chatting with a couple of monks who, much to our surprise, had a great sense of humour!
Another highlight of this part of our trip was a three day trek (well the tour agencies all refer to it as trek, it makes you feel adventurous, but you could just call it a hike) an hour outside of Chiang Mai, which included a short elephant ride (kind of like a pony ride but higher up!), whitewater rafting and bamboo rafting. Of course all of these activities were fun, but what I really enjoyed was being in the middle of a bamboo forest, so lush and exotic, and the feeling that we were truly isolated from civilization (even though there was probably a road we couldn't see a few kms away)! We slept in bamboo huts with thatched banana leaf roofs, near a hilltribe village (with a fire literally inside the hut!, I can tell you now that we're back alive), in fact, we froze, it got so darn cold. The hiking was a real challenge, mostly up the first day, mostly down the second, and mostly in pain on the third! Julien hiked the whole way without a single complaint since our guide gave him his handmade slingshot and he happily fired berries at the trees the whole way. In fact, I was quite fascinated by these guides, they could make anything out of bamboo, and hiked way faster than us, with seemingly no effort and no specialized equipment- meanwhile we're all huffing and puffing in our fancy hiking shoes.
We were quite sore when we got back, so of course we "had" to treat ourselves to a massage the next day. A rough way to end 2008!