We got up bright and early this morning looking for breakfast before our scheduled day trip just out of Chang Mai.  The unfortunate thing being that most places do not offer breakfast until after 0800hrs.  (we had to be ready for a pick up between 0800 – 0830 hrs).  Even our Guest House wasn’t open for business as of yet

So we headed out and found the coffee shop, Black Canyon, and had a coffee.  They would make us coffee but there kitchen wasn’t open either!  Still the coffee was good.

Turns out we could have taken our time drank a second cup and had some breakfast since the pickup did not turn up till 0830hrs.

Still soon we were off after a few more people were picked up.

We arrived at the elephant camp and after the purchase of a bag of bananas to feed the elephant as we road we were off.  One of the elephants had a baby which followed along, very cute.  The locals had set up stations through the bush where you could buy more bags of bananas.  It was kind of funny since the elephants all knew that was where they were coming from and headed in to them as soon as they came into view.

We did that general elephant ride thing.  On the trails through the bush, traipsing through the river, all up the ride was about an hour long.

Next up was what was described as a ‘mini trek’ to see a couple of tribes.  Not even sure I’d call it a trek and the ‘village’ such as it was tended to be a couple of tribes people selling their goods.  Still it was a pleasant walk through the rice fields and the bush.  We stopped on the way through at a little waterfall that would have been nicer if 3 other groups had not rocked up just after we got there (you gotta love ‘soft mini treks’).

After that it was time for lunch and a couple of the others asked us if we were ‘Army or something’, apparently they think we walk too fast.  As Cass pointed out at one point, ‘if we walk any slower we’ll be going backwards…’.  We just laughed and comment that for us the trek really wasn’t that hard.

The supplied lunch was nice consisting of rice, vegetables and a potato and chicken red curry.

After lunch we headed off for the bamboo rafting, three to a raft.  Now that was fun.  We floated down the river with a guide, we guiding, the raft in order to miss the rocks and tree branches.  Or so you would think.  I think our guide was a kamikaze. He would head straight for the low branches, we’d all duck or fend branches off with our arms.  Then he turn around with a grin, count heads and head straight for the next obstacle.

At one point one of the other rafts containing the Spanish couple and one of the Japanese guys (they were really funny the entire trip) got stuck on a rock.  Our raft collided with the back of there’s.  Unfortunately the Japanese guys slipped as our raft was connecting with theres and his leg slipped between the rafts then rather than getting squished between the rafts and the rather large rock he jumped up to the rock.  Without his weight on the back his raft took off leaving him stranded and just as ours was pulling away, at the urging of his countryman (on the back of our raft) he leapt from the rock onto the back of our raft, which nearly resulted in all of us going for a swim (and resulted in quite a bit of laughter from both rafts.)  Then as we started pulling up to his original raft, at the urging of the guides he made his way up the raft then jumped back to his own.  To much cheering and laughter from both rafts.