We woke up around 8:00 to give copies of our passport to the guide to take to the tourist police (so they knew who was where) then later around 9:00 were picked up to bring our bags to storage. We left around 10 so the guide could pick up the ingredients for our dinner at a market. Our tour consisted of 4 Danish girls: Louise, Lada, Sophie, Melaina; 2 Austrian girls: Agnes, Juliet; 2 Australians: Sam, Lisa; 1 U.K. guy: Tej and us 3 Canadians.
The first stop was the elephant park. We had some food first and then got up on the elephants. We were short one elephant sort, so myself and Tej ended up riding on the neck of the elephant where the guide usually goes. Amy and Jen were in the seat behind me… at least at the beginning. The seat started tilted to one side, Amy’s side, and it just kept going more and more. Eventually it was me jumping off the elephant to try and hold up the seat while Amy and Jen hung on up top. Eventually we got them back up onto the neck of the elephant and were able to reattach the the seat to the elephant and continue the tour. The rest of the trip on the elephant consisted of him sucking up saliva and spraying it on us as we walked through the jungle.
We then got to the first day of hiking. It was pretty hard the first day. Really steep, really hot, and really dry. For the most part the group stayed pretty close together, but for the end, the steepest part Tej and I decided to go off ahead a bit instead of waiting for everyone as we had been and as happens when two guys are off showing that neither of us are all that tired, we ended up hiking up a lot fast than either of us really wanted to.
Eventually we met up with the guides brother who took us to the village. By the way, the guide’s nickname is Oaf — pronounced “Off.” Anyways, we get up there, a really neat bamboo building with nice mosquito nets. Amy and I got a massage from the tribe, it was really nice after the day of hiking. I had 3 people working on me at once… fan-tastic!
Dinner was curry by candle light, followed by fruit. We played cards with Tej and Louise and Lada for a while and had a pretty early night (even after trying to stay up “late” aka like 9:00)