Me Love You Long Time

I only woke up briefly in the night and only the one time, but when I did, my right arm had gone completely numb and limp, because I'd slept on it in a way that cut off the blood circulation. This happens to me every now and then and I always get scared that my arm will fall off from having no blood running through it. I begin frantically shaking my arm, trying to encourage blood back into it, waking Rachelle up in the process. I fall straight back to sleep. Rachelle didn't. In the morning she asks me what on earth I was doing.

Today is our first real activities day. Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand (after Bangkok) yet it has the most activities to do because only one hour away in all directions is lots of rain forest. We say goodbye to Jeremy because he's leaving for Laos and tells us that on Friday another guide called Tony will be taking us further. A tow-truck-bus then pulls up and a fairly young Thai guy gets out to collect us for our day. There are five others already in the truck.

The weather is beautifully sunny. We travel the hour to the elephant camp, stopping off at a small orchid and butterfly park. We spend an hour riding elephants in the forest. I think the elephants are well treated and I certainly hope so. Rachelle seems to find it much easier to stay on the seat than I do. I grip the seat tightly because I keep slipping forward. After the hour riding, we buy bananas to feed the elephants and take lots of photos. The elephants are cute.

The second part of our day is an hour trek to a waterfall in the forest. I've really been looking forward to swimming in a waterfall. We walk up along the side of the large stream that is flowing from the much anticipated waterfall and we pass through some small hill-top tribe villages. Half way through the trek we stop for food and the Thai guy makes me a hat out of a big leaf - it's not very fashionable, but I wear it whilst I eat. The guide is quite a playful, jokey person.

The waterfall is amazing. It's massive and water gushes from over the top. Rachelle and I go straight in. It was surprising how powerful the water came down and with my back to the pouring water, it was like being pummeled, but not enough to really hurt. There were lots of other groups at the waterfall, so it was quite busy. After a while they started to leave and eventually Rachelle and I were the only ones in the waterfall - a perfect time for photos. 

Next is river rafting. The difficulty scale for river rafting goes from 1 to 6 and the river we were rafting was supposedly 2/3. I think it was more of a 2. Six of us jump in the boat with a strange Thai fellow as our captain. All the way down the river he shouts things like, "come on guy", "more power guy" and "me love you long time", whilst occasionally making woop noises and laughing strangely. One of the guys fell in and we had to drag him back into the boat. Another guy lost his ore and we had to chase after it. Maybe it was a level 3 after all.

Towards the end of our river run we got out of the rafting boat and sat on a bamboo raft, slowly drifting down the river. It was very relaxing. It was then time to go back to the guest house, but not before making a quick stop in another tribal village. In the evening we got food and chilled in a cafe.