My 26 Hours in Chang Mai Part 1: Day Trek

Let me start off my saying that my day/night in Chang Mai was probably one of my favorite days/nights from my trip. I will definitely be back to Chang Mai at some point in my life.

My first train ride was miserable. I felt like I was on a bus driving over a street with potholes, and I was freezing, and constantly felt like the train was going to derail, and I didn't sleep at all during the 13 hour train ride. Nonetheless, it was an experience.

I arrived in the train station. Lost and confused. "Lost girl" look didn't really help. A Thai man laughed at me when I asked for a map. Followed some other foreigners into a truck and ended up at the Little Bird Guesthouse. Met Yuto (from Japan, currently studying in Australia), who coincidentally was sitting next to me on the train, got a room together and met two Canadians who were on the same train as us. After getting our rooms, we all immediately booked a trek for the day which gave us about 45 minutes to get settled and get ready for the day.

The whole gang

The trek was AWESOME. Mainly we had such a great group so no matter what we did, the day would have been awesome regardless. I even met two guys who had just finished teaching in Korea! First we went to an elephant farm where we rode elephants, but apparently my elephant was taken out of retirement for the day so she was rather stubborn and we didn't really go anywhere. We tried singing songs for her to move, she seemed to really enjoy "Edelweiss".

In the jungle

Next we went on a bamboo rafting trip down the river, It was really interesting to see the Thai people living on the side of the river, and seeing how they go about their daily lives. To make this short, I'll summarize the rest: we went on an hour trek through the jungle which was beautiful! The drive up was an experience, there were many close encounters with our van going over huge bumps in the road right at the edge of the mountain. We hiked about an hour though the jungle and came across a waterfall that you could swim in and where the boys in our trek decided to jump off the waterfall.

Bridge over river

Girls of the Long Neck Tribe

Our trek ended at a long neck village. It was really interesting, but really weird. The lock neck village isn't a real village, it's basically a tourist trap set up by tour companies and not the people themselves. I've heard that at some villages the people are basically imprisoned, but the one we went to, it was a tourist trap but the people seemed to be very well off, we speculated that the people probably get some commission. The long neck village wasn't necessarily only people of the long neck tribe,  there were also people from other tribes, refugee tribes from what I understood.

Chaz, Honey our wonderful tour guide, and me

At the end of the trek, we all decided to meet up later for a night out on the town, which gave us about an hour to get ready...