The Northern Thai Trek

We'd have been fools not to partake in Northern Thailand's top visitor attraction: trekking. We signed up for a private four-person, three-day two-night trek with the Axners and a designated guide.

Pan, our gentle, all-knowing Shirpa (playable by a young Pete Postlethwaite) picked us up from our hotel and drove us to the elephant training grounds (read: elephant school). They begin education at age six, reach their peak education at age eighteen, and retire to the tropical woodlands at age sixty-five - much like us humans. They have an abundance of free roaming space and live richer lives than many humans (so don't feel bad when you see the video we captured of the elephants doing their little dance). We rode on elephant-back for an hour through varying terrain, then we began our trek.

The first day was a three-hour uphill trek to a small village where we stayed the night in a "farang" (white foreigner) cabin. Pan cooked us a feast of soup, chili paste, and stir-fry, and we crashed after several hands of rummy.

• 1:00 AM: Cock-a-doodle-doooooo! Cock-a-doo! ...a chorus of roosters perform a medley of varying lyrics, intonations, and gusto. Interesting to witness.
• 1:05 AM: We lose interest.
• 1:30 AM: Ahh, silence. Sleep at last.
• 1:50 AM: Chorus begins next verse. Repeat every twenty minutes until 7:00 AM.
• 7:30 AM: Breakfast, discuss beheading the village roosters.
  

The next day held a seven-hour trek, mostly uphill, through varying terrain - woodlands (reminiscent of Northern Minnesota), rainforest with parasitic strangle-vines and orchids, meadows of green tea bushes, and a sprawling bamboo forest. Wild banana trees were scattered throughout - if you opt to peel and eat one of their fruits, mind the seeds). Pan mentioned the possibility of sampling some authentic Thai moonshine (fermented from corn) at the destination village.

By 4 PM we arrived at our next accommodation, Baan Pha Daeng - a tiny Lahu village. We slept and ate in a charming bamboo and thatch hut on stilts with a private porch, adjacent to similar cabins. If you view it from the front, you can see a half-obstructed view of the landscape behind it; though the bamboo paneling represents privacy, frosted bathroom glass would suppress more sights and sounds.

We ate another of Pan's tasty Thai candlelight suppers, and he made good on the moonshine - it was warming, reminiscent of sake, and could probably fuel a small go-cart.

We turned in for bed two hours after sunset and lied on our backs on the floor of the bamboo hut, under our mosquito nets. At the risk of sounding pedantic and overly-sentimental, this is our account:

We could hear through the bamboo panels to the adjacent huts, and we could share in their evening episodes with our eyes closed: a teenage mother frustrated because her crying infant wouldn't feed, a nylon-stringed classical guitar strumming basic, open chords, a woman pouring used dishwater from her stilted porch onto a family of chicks, Pan speaking quiet Thai with a Lahu village elder.

The village finally fell silent for the night, the stray and wild dogs of Northern Thailand held a brief forum of howls, and then all that remained was the ring of the cicadas, phasing in and out of unison.

Hours later, the dogs and roosters reminded us that they, in fact, owned the morning, and we were merely members of their captive audience.

In recounting our other Southeast Asia experiences and sharing in Baan Pha Daeng's humanity, we had acquired a colorful, albeit rudimentary, understanding of life and culture in this corner of the world.

Though we suffered a nigh-sleepless night with a morning hike ahead of us, we were already comforted by the memories we'd created on this leg of our trip, and we regretted nothing.

We ended our trek yawning under the sun on a bamboo raft.

Eat some snow for us.