Rebecca 1: Nature 0

Monday the 28^th of Feburary. We again rented a scooter (although we upgraded the manual for an auto with much more comfortble seats), we left our packs at the guest house and rode 3hrs out of Chiang Mai to Tham Chiang Dao. Dave was excited to see nature and I just wanted out of the city. After a bit of riding around, with both Dave and I at the wheel, we mangaged to find the best room yet at Malee's nature bungalows (with a massive double bed, no showering over the toilet and the place has a pool!). Malee Is a lively lady that has been there for 15 years, running the place with her Swiss-German husband Kurt. 

This is a rural refueling station - I am pretty sure my grandfather had one when I was very small!

So far we have walked up to a Buddhist wat in the rainforest (which had spectacular views). We have also been underground in Chiang Dao's cave system (20Baht entry and 200Baht for a guide; yes you need a guide to help you see in the dark). The caves were not the most impressive I have seen and while it was fun to squeeze in between various crevaces, upon reflection, I would have liked to hear some information about their formation etc. This would have been infinately better than our Thai man, who pointed at innocuous formations saying 'elephant', 'frog', 'milk' (this was in reference to two boulders that looked like lopsided breasts). It was fun nonetheless to be out and about doing things rather than eating, of which we do a lot.

Speaking of being out and about, I can now say I have completed one of the most grueling (in my opinion) hike/climb in my life. We set out at noon (in the heat of the day, silly I know) armed with sunscreen and hats, a GPS, 600ml of water each and a packet of 5 cream filled biscuits each in case we got hungry, with the intention of hitting the FLAGS trail. Thank god I insisted on the GPS because even with it's marvellous directions we got lost. So that was the beginning of my adventure, 1hrs worth of walking on the wrong trail. This was fine enough but where I went wrong was to suggest that if we only did a little of our own trailmaking (i.e. rock climbing using our trusty GPS) we wouldn't have to go back to the very beginning. Bad idea. After 5 mins of perilous adventure in which I was sure one of us was going to either get bitten by a funnel web spider or fall to our death, I ventured an opinion that we should in fact begin again. This is what we did. 

So, it is 1pm and we have 5hrs to scale a 4.5km trail that is 1200m up. Sound easy? Well in our case this actually translates to about 2.5hrs of climbing (seriously its a very steep incline the entire way). After 30mins of intense climbing where every one step is two backwards due to the loose footing, my calfs were screaming at me and I was drenched in sweat. The GPS, although informative, was telling me I had 2 more hours of this pain. We were determined. It got to a point at which we had to stop and rest every 20m due to the intense hardship we were going through. Being determined, we struggled on and even though the last 100m (the hardest) was directly up a sheer rock face – we made it!!!!!! Standing on top of what I deem a mountain, I was elated. The views of Chiang Dao valley were beautiful. 

I sacrificed Dave to the mountain gods.

Unfortunately our elation was short lived as we only had 20mins of resting before going down became the task at hand. The thick bamboo and leafy forest which at first had seemed quite beautiful was now a dangerous slippery slide of loose leaves and red dirt. All in all I'd have to say that I was quite proud of myself for complteing the trek itself, but when you are covered from head to toe in lathers of sweat, dirt, leaves, cobwebs and swatted mosquitos, all you want is water (we had finished ours on the trip up) and ice-cream! Billabongs have never tasted so good. We did in 3.5hrs what our hotellier tells us he does in 5hrs (even though he is about 60, I'm still proud). My reward was a soothing dip in the pool and 3 courses at dinner...ahh more food. Rebecca 1, nature 0!