The sixth day of the tour was possibly one of the best days of my life and surely one of the best days of my exchange! In the morning we drove to an elephant camp and saw an elephant show when we got there where we saw elephant’s paint better painting than I could but it really bothered me when I saw how they treated the elephants and the Rotary did warn us before we went that they always get complaints from the exchange students but they can promise us the elephants aren’t actually hurt they just need to control them because they are so big and accidents can happen, but still I felt sorry for them! I got picked up by an elephant trunk and I thought I would be too heavy so that was quite cool! After that we went ox-cart riding followed by riding elephants!! Me and Noemie rode on one elephant while 2 of our best friends Frederik and Ryan rode on the one just in front of us and naturally that became a competition to see who had the best elephant (mine won can I just say) we walked down a hillside and through a river and trough a forest and the whole time I kept thinking how amazing and cliché it is to be riding elephants in the forest in Thailand and I LOVED IT. Our walk ended at a part of the river where the river was quite deep and quite wide and most of the elephants got taken back to their camps but a few stayed with us. We got brushes and the elephants sat/laid down so we could “scrub” them with the brushes. Can I just say how nervous this whole scene made me! I kept looking for my younger friends and telling them to watch out and not stand there and move away and be careful because the elephants could roll over or stand up or sit on you and it was all too much for me to handle! But out of nowhere one of the other exchange students Claire came to me and gave me a hug and told me “I think you can take a few minutes off from being everybody’s exchange mom and have some fun” and just when she finished talking one elephant pooped right in the water where everybody was standing and you just saw everybody running in different directions covered in elephant poop and I calmed down and joined everybody else. I got to sit on the bare back of an elephant and wash his ears, something I will never forget. After a while of just sitting around in the river and playing with the elephants we started an elephant poop fight and had sooo much fun, needless to say we attracted quite a crowd when some of the other visitors of the camp noticed what we were throwing at each other but we did care we had a great time. We then got split into groups and we got onto bamboo rafts and started going down the river, my raft had Etienne, Ryan, Frederik, Anya, David and me. Anya stayed on the raft but the rest of us decided that as soon as we were out of sight of the other rafts we got off the raft and swam next to raft and flouted in the water and steered the raft ourselves and laid in the sun for a while and just made the very best of our 2 hour raft ride. All the other people had such a normal rafting ride, stayed on the raft, looked at the scenery and dried off but not us, and I adore that quality in my friends! When we got to our stop we got back into vans and made our way to a hotel where we had such a great dinner and then went to bed early.
The next day we drove very deep into the mountains to Mae Kampong home stay. When we got there we got grouped into groups of 4 and then sent to our traditional host families. When we got to the host houses we were all in awe of how truly traditional their way of living was. The house I lived in only had electricity in one room and the whole house was made out of wood with the bathroom on the lower floor in the corner and a lowered area on the living room floor where fires are made and great views of the mountains and the rest of the village and I really liked it. We got an hour to get dressed and meet our families and then we went on a hike in the mountains. I did most of the hike with Etienne and Claire and Etienne sang for most of the hike and I so love listening to him sing and make jokes so what would have been a really long hike was actually bare able and memorable because of simple singing memories. We stopped about half way up and learnt how to make rice in bamboo sticks and things you could find in the environment and sat on the jungle floor and ate lunch packed by our host families running away from huge bugs every 5 minutes. We then finished the second half of the walk and got to the mountain top where we took 100 000 pictures and ate watermelon and then we had to walk down the mountain again and we walked well into the night with no flashlights so that was a scary and great experience but the day was filled with great small things.
On the 8th day of the trip we went to the highest point in Thailand at 2565 Meters and we got to walk through an elderly rainforest where we decided to play Ninja and got into trouble 3 times for making a noise, but I wish I could explain to you guys how big the smile on my face is right now because things like that are exactly why I love these people. We went down the mountain a little big for lunch and then we went hiking in another area of the mountains in the view from those mountains were so amazing and the different types of jungle we saw in one area was so cool. When we got to the summit point Frederik and Fran (after making sure the exchange students were the only people on the mountain) they decided they wanted that one crazy, insane, memorable exchange year photo and stripped right there in front of all of us and got p’Kong to take a picture from behind of the summit point, the view, beautiful dry grass and their lovely white bums, arms in the air and im sure if we could see their faces they would have a huge smile on their crazy faces. After the strip show we made our way down the mountain again and let me just add the whole day so far had been about 15degrees but we had been walking so much that it just felt like perfect chilly weather. But we sat down and had some hot instant noodles while talking about football. Then we drove to another remote lodge if you can call it that and had dinner repaired by exchange students followed by a walk to the river I the dark and then a camp fire (mostly made by me because Europeans suck at making a camp fires) and we just sat outside in the chilly weather talking until the morning hours.
The next day after 3 hours of sleep it was my teams turn to make breakfast for everybody else so we made 250 pieces of French toast and 60 hotdogs (still in the plastic because it was 5 in the morning and we were tired) and a lot of fruit. All and all we did pretty well except for the hotdogs. Then we went to a local primary school in the mountains and got dived into groups to clean separate parts of the school and paint and donate things to make it a little better for the poor kids. My team and another team got sent to the bathrooms and the areas around the bathrooms. We cleaned in a focused manner for about an hour after witch we started a water and soup war and had lots of fun except for the fact that you could see through my shirt so for my own sake I did what I could to get everybody back to work! The whole time we were working I kept thinking about how many school like that one we had in South Africa and how they could benefit from something like that. When we finished our work we went to play with the little kids but I saw how horrible the main wall we painted looked so I grabbed the paint and tried to do what I could to make it look a bit better, Miri and Emily and Isabel saw what I was doing and came to help me, we were still sitting in front of that wall more than an hour after everybody else had left and I’m sorry to say it did not look a whole lot better but we did what we could, we wanted it to look good for those kids. Finally we decided that we had done everything we could do and went back to the lodge for lunch. After lunch we were handed big plastic/fabric industrial bags and shovels and got sent to the river. On our way we stopped at a strawberry farm and got to eat some of the fresh strawberries straight of the plants, delicious! After getting stuck in the mud a few times we got to the part of the river where the water was quite low and (about hip depth) and got divided into 3 groups A. the people who had to shovel sand into the big bags B. the people who had to stand in the river and hand over the sand bags in a row C. the people who had to stand in the river and look for rocks and start to form the wall that we were building in the river to try and bring the water level up to help the plants and animals in the area. We had such an unexpectedly great time trying to build this dam in the river and felt so great when we got the water level up to about shoulder height! We then walked back to the lodge to dry off and then had dinner. After dinner we ones again made a fire and sat there for a while but then about 20 of us all went to one room pilled in onto the two little beds and watched a movie!
I once again only got 3 hours of sleep, but on these tours it’s like you used all the built-up extra sleep you got over the years and you find a way to make the best of every single day because you know you only have so many days and so many hours with these people and you don’t want to waste you limited hours on sleep!
