It’s 9pm as I lay wide awake staring up at my hot pink mosquito net.  It is the only thing separating me from the sounds and bugs of the Thailand rainforest.  Reflecting back on my last 12 hours which have brought me to this point is just one more moment of the trip where I must wonder “what the hell was I thinking?!”  I don’t camp.  I hate being dirty.  My father has worked for a company that invented the innerspring mattress since I was 8, so I’ve had a king sized bed almost that long.   Yet I find myself here, crunching up my rain jacket and tomorrow’s “clean” shirt to suffice as a pillow and begging sleep to come so I can dream that the sharp point under my sleeping bag is not in fact a broken piece of bamboo but just part of a deep, deep tissue massage…

It sounded like an adventure when we booked it…and yes, a really good story to report back.  But when I loaded up my elephant at 9am and was reminded that we wouldn’t return to air conditioning or running water for 25 hours, the reality hit hard and I considered turning around…if only I could get my elephant to follow any of my commands! [Ed. note: “Ben” to turn, come on now, we went to class and everything!]

We marched along through the tall, sweet grass and across the small river, my husband’s elephant stopping to eat every 50 feet without fail.  No matter how many times he shouted “Bai” (forward), that hungry, hungry elephant had a mind of its own and a belly of its own that required 200 kilograms of food a day to suffice!  So we set our pace by his elephant and eventually rolled up to our camp…just after 10 am.   Now, I’m not the expert here, but if our only plan was to ride the elephants out to camp and then camp the night, could we not have made that 1 hour ride say at 4 pm and enjoyed the AC and running water for a few additional hours first??  Apparently not…  So what grand plans did they have for us to kill the time?  Nothing.  Yup.   We napped.  And read our books on the Kindles I tucked into the backpack last minute thankfully. And then it was lunchtime…sitting on the ground, eating something described as lamb intestines…raw.   Okay, so we actually didn’t eat that, because while I try most anything in hopes of not offending the locals, I draw the line at possible raging food poisoning when I don’t have running water and I’m an hour elephant ride away from a car to the nearest doctor…Luckily, there was whiskey.   Yes, instead of food, our lunch consisted of shots of Thai “moonshine” straight out of a cup carved from some bamboo.  When in Rome, right??

The afternoon had an adventure–hiking to the waterfall and collecting firewood and bamboo to cook dinner.   This we were used to.   We have hiked to many waterfalls back home, how different could it be here?  Apparently on little food and lots of whiskey it is a bit different.  My husband fell in the water.   Shin deep, drowning his boot.   Exactly the situation any hiker wants with an unknown downhill trek ahead.   Okay, so we sat awhile, he wrung things out and knew there was a dry pair of flip flops back at camp. [Ed. note: yup. Not my finest hour.] So we headed back up the waterfall rocks….and I slipped.   Confession time: I’m super clumsy…like run into walls as I walk past in the office clumsy.   So the fact that I have lasted almost 7 weeks without many bumps and bruises is a blessing.  Today I tested that luck.  I took a big step up and my right leg stayed put…but my left leg slid…down, down, down the rock and my body started to follow.   So my husband did what he could to save me and my bones from that crash, he grabbed my mahout pants…and then I dangled like the Coppertone baby on the edge of a waterfall until another guide stopped laughed and came down to help us restore ourselves to the path. [Ed. note: I needed to stop her from falling…]

Thankfully, dinner was next…and they brought 2 bottles of whiskey this time.   So that brings us to now.   The sun went down at 6:30pm.  Dinner was done and the bugs were out.   We retreated to our nets for protection but our bodes aren’t used to the early to bed, early to rise lifestyle–especially when you add a little whiskey, then we think it’s party time!  So all I can do is lay here awake, listening to the sounds of the bugs and the elephants and trying in vain to make this bamboo mat feel like a pillow top mattress…I want to swear I’ll never camp again, but I know that my bad decision making skills have booked at least one more night on this trip so I have to at least hope that trek will at least include a shower somewhere…

(This is a GoPro of the trek from our camp…I didn’t really write much about it, but imagine the camel ride except we’re riding bareback this time…)

http://https://youtu.be/ZzsBTqQSMP8