Day 3

Woke up this morning already feeling I was going to miss this place since it was going to be my last day here. We’d actually booked one of the tours to go for an elephant ride, tribal villages visit and river-raft ride. But actually, what I was really looking forward to that morning was another delicious Chiang Dao Nest breakfast!

In my head I’d an idea of what to expect from the elephant ride; a smallish elephant that probably took you around in circles like in the Singapore Zoo. That idea was blown away the moment we met our elephants!

They were huge, we could hardly get on top of them. And once on top, we had to hang on for dear life – because the ride involved going up and down a long mountain trail! It was more exciting than I imagined; in some places the trail was barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and here we were stomping it on an elephant.

Sometimes, the trail was inches to the mountain’s edge, one slipped step and that would have been all we wrote. And some parts, the incline was so steep we gasped because we couldn’t believe our elephant could make it. I have to hand it to the handler though, we were hanging on so hard in some places because we were slipping out of our seats, but he just sat on the elephant’s head cool as the weather around us.

We reached the first tribal village via elephant and started our trek/village visit. This part was a disappointment – calling them tribal villages was definitely overselling it. To put them more bluntly would be to call them kampongs (in my local dialects) or just dilapidated old little settlements.

After lunch and a break, we went on the river-raft ride, which was a beautiful highlight for the day. The rafts were really nothing more than bamboo strapped together, and the cold water lapping our feet together with a long, peaceful ride down the river made me feel serene and at peace with the world. I was alive, and I felt absolutely grateful for it.