We made our way north via Bangkok (for a few hours) to Chiang Mai in the
northeast corner of the country. We had a tour already set up for us that
we planned in Bangkok. Don't ever make tour arrangements without actually
going to the shop that runs it. We did a great hike into the highlands to
stay with a hill tribe village. The hike was beautiful and the
people were really nice. Our guide thought that since three of the people
in our group were teachers that it would be fun to stop by the school in
one of the villages. We sat in the classroom while the teachers did their
thing and did our part in distracting the nearby kids with the video
camera. I did some yoyo tricks for them when we were introducing ourselves
and they seemed to really enjoy that. After the hike we went on a really
slow bamboo rafting ride followed by elephant riding. The Elephants didn't
seem to be the happiest of them for obvious reasons. It was a tourist draw
a little bit off the beaten path but very high throughput. It was ran by
some really shady people. (we did find some properly treated elephants in Pai)
The next day we had a tour that we kind of got pressured in to to see monkeys
and the golden triangle borders of Thailand, Burma, and Laos. It was
pretty much a shopping tour. They took us to all the cheesiest things and
weren't even planning to take us to what we wanted to see the most, the
monkeys. Me and Ryan put a little friendly pressure on the guide about how
his company lied to us about most of this tour and persuaded him to take us to
the monkeys. One climbed up Ryan to get the banana. There usually was about 300 but most were up in the caves because of
the rain. The string of stupid tourist sites and nasty city noise and
smells motivated Matt and I to get out. We somehow had not yet found the
budget backpacker type stuff, only suitcase tourist stuff. We took a cramped
local bus (definitely not the VIP buses we had been taking) into the mountains
to Pai. Ryan decided to stay in Chiang Mai to take a Thai massage class.
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My Thai Tattoo (aka Motorscooter Muffler Burn)
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and Matt Shoyers'
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Start of the hike
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This thing is about 4 inches long
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same for this one
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Ryan showin' 'em how it's done
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hill tribe schoolhouse
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I'm not eating that one
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WT in Thailand (they weren't american was the weird thing)
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and this is downstream from a village?
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and they don't have modern sewage systems?
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whatever
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I'm not going to pretend like we drinking a bit
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I almost fell off trying to show off
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This is how unimpressed we were!
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beleive it or don't
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this is as close as we would ever get to Myanmar
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killer attack monkeys
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