Upcountry Report: Trekking in Chiang Mai

I was gone for forty-two days.

I worked for thirty days and had about 4 days or so devoted mostly to traveling between points.

My work days were uniformly boring; I was always working in upcountry areas away from people, facilities and entertainment, sleeping by myself in a room with a fan and a rabbit-ear TV. Breakfast was served at 7 am and dinner at 6 pm. In between I had a full work day, and the evenings were spent completely alone.

The worst part of my trip was the beginning. I left Bangkok on Sunday the 1st of June, and by the time I arrived at my destination a few hours later I had a terrible fever and I was sick and dizzy. I took some medicine and went to bed, sleeping for nearly 14 hours.

I got to work on Monday morning feeling like I wanted to die. I got progressively better, but I was sick every day for the first ten-day work period, then went to Chiang Mai for my holiday break.

For the first dozen days I had no internet connection, but then a friend traveled up from Bangkok to meet me in Chiang Mai and brought the Bluetooth adapter I had left behind. It malfunctioned during my final week of work and I had to use a backup adapter. Due to conflicts with the software on my computer I had limited usage and had to continually fiddle with and reboot my computer to maintain internet access.

Fortunately, before heading up-country I downloaded a full season of Law & Order – Criminal Intent, which got me through that first painful week without internet access.

Those five paragraphs wrap up 95% of what I did during the 30 days devoted to work. I only varied the routine a few times, and with the exception of a trip up to the Burmese border which I will detail in another blog, nothing happened that was worth telling you about. The highlight of my work days may have been one night when I saw a grasshopper come under my door and into my room, followed half a moment later by a small lizard in hot pursuit. The grasshopper went under my bed followed by the lizard. The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion, so I didn’t try to watch the remaining action.

The balance of the trip was contained in two vacation breaks of about five days each. I wrote an account of the second holiday break on the Big Mango blog. What I learned is that Chiang Mai city is an interesting place with plenty of things to do. The pay for play scene is much smaller than Bangkok, but if you have broader interests then the city has a lot to offer.

I found one little bar girl there who I especially enjoyed spending time with after I barfined her, and I met a few others who were very interesting.

But my first holiday break was very different. I went trekking in the mountains.

I’ve never been shy about saying on the blog that I enjoy walking. I’ve also been fairly clear that I’m overweight and starting to pass from the prime of my life into middle age. Perhaps I should have reflected a bit more on the challenges of trekking through the mountains under those conditions. It turns out that hauling a backpack through the mountains of northern Thailand is slightly more challenging than walking the streets of Bangkok.

But to make it worse – much worse I think – I was at the end of a week and a half of very a bad bronchial illness. I’d spent most of the previous 10 days coughing and spitting up mucous from my lungs. I probably should have ditched the trekking idea, but I’d been looking forward to it for a couple of months, and I told myself that with the amount of walking I do, the mountain trek would be challenging but do-able.

I was wrong.

First of all, the oldest of my companions on the trip was 20 years younger than me. There were 2 European & 2 South African backpackers and a Thai girl. The guys were all relatively fit, and they were all stretched a bit by the experience. I was brought to the point of death several times.

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Don’t let this photo fool you… this was the very beginning of our trek on the first morning. Soft level ground and an easy path. I wanted to take pics when we were walking but on my first fall I almost lost my camera when it fell out of my pocket and into the mud. I wrapped it in plastic and put it in my pack. I don’t have any photos of the mountain trails, but they were every bit as difficult as described.

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Around 2 p.m. on the first day, as we were climbing a relatively benign uphill path, I realized I had probably overextended myself. I was in the mountains (thinner air), I’d been sick (I was wheezing and coughing up mucous), it was mid-afternoon (hot!), my pack was heavy (3 liters of water and personal supplies for three days), and I was climbing up-hill (dragging the extra 50 pounds I carry in my gut). I started feeling a bit dizzy and I realized I was struggling to breathe. I thought about the consequences of having a heart attack on a mountain path in Northern Thailand, and the possibility of surviving it.

I sat down.

Fortunately, I was already last in line, with only one of the two guides behind me. He was a slender 25 year old who could walk up and down the mountains all day. I asked him how much further we would be going. He spent quite a while trying to calculate, so I rephrased the question: “How long does it take you to walk to the next village where we’ll be sleeping tonight?”

He answered quickly: “Oh, about an hour and a half!”

I groaned a bit, but thought that if I paced myself I could manage an hour and a half of walking. I told him it would be tough, but I figured I could handle an hour and a half – just barely.

He screwed up his face. “Oh no, it takes ME an hour and a half. For YOU, I think about four hours.”

Well, it was 2:00 p.m. and he was saying I’d be struggling like this until nearly six o’clock. I could imagine the sun going down with me still struggling to climb a path with this energetic little guide telling me to hurry up. I suggested that I ought to go back downhill to the place we’d left from earlier.

He offered to take me on an alternate route, walking on a shorter and easier path that I could do in about 90 minutes. I agreed.

I think all the walking was actually good for me; the next day my lungs seemed pretty clear. But on the first afternoon when we arrived at the village little after 3 pm I immediately went to the bamboo hut assigned as a dormitory for my group and fell into a deep sleep.

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This was the area where we slept the first night.

We all slept in one large bamboo hut, with a thin mattress on the floor and mosquito netting above. I actually slept very well.

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I woke groggily when the other hikers came in.

Surprisingly they didn’t ostracize me or laugh at me when they arrived. They were young & fit, but very tired and I’m old, so I guess they decided to cut me some slack. In fact, we sat around talking until well past midnight. The fact that I lived in Thailand gave me the opportunity to add something to the conversation, since all four of them had been in the country less than a week. I actually enjoyed it.

The next day I handled things much better. I think the strenuous activity of the day before had cleared most of the shit out of my lungs. It also helped that the weather changed from sunny and hot to rain.

The rain made things treacherous though. The path we were walking on was very narrow…typically only between 8 inches and 20 inches wide. It was a dirt path, but with the rain that meant a mud path.

Walking on flat ground that’s not such a big deal, but we were clambering up and down mountains, which means that there were three conditions to be faced.

(1) Climbing up a slope meant that footholds were unsure. I was last in line, so the foot marks were pretty clear for stepping, but I was also double the weight of the other hikers, so frequently the footholds gave way and I fell to my knees several times. I frequently found myself grabbing at something (a bamboo shoot for example) only to have it break apart or crumble in my hands. The guide behind me kept telling me to walk slowly, take my time until I finally got exasperated enough to use a breath to yell at him to shut the fuck up. I was a bit frazzled.

He also kept offering to carry my pack for me, saying that it would be easier. He was right, of course, but the day I don’t carry my own pack is the day I’ll want to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger, so I finally told him to shut up about that too, but I was a bit more polite this time.

(2) Walking on level stretches was easier on the lungs but harder on the nerves. The path was narrowest here, and very slippery. We would walk along the ridge of the mountain on a muddy path no wider than my shoe facing the possibility of tumbling 30 or 40 meters down a fairly steep slope. It was actually dangerous.

I didn’t have any particular problem here, but it was a bit nerve wracking at times, especially when we’d just finished a difficult uphill portion and my legs were shaky and my breathing laboured. I often paused a minute or two just to steady myself before engaging these sections of the path.

(3) Ironically, probably the most effort went into walking downhill. Every step brought the possibility of the ground giving way or my foot slipping in the mud.

It happened several times, and I actually went down twice. Fortunately I wasn’t the only one – several members of the group ended up taking a tumble on the downhill portions. The first time I fell going downhill I landed hard, and actually bounced back up to a standing position due to the steep grade. It hurt, but was actually relatively graceful.

The second fall was a bit more spectacular. I planted my foot and the mud was like oil. My right foot shot out from under me, I landed on my butt and slid about ten meters down the muddy path, stopping only when I collided awkwardly with one of the hikers in front of me. Fortunately I didn’t take him down. I was awarded 8 ½ points by the group.

The destination on the second day was a large cascading stream, and we reached it soon after, around mid-day. I was covered in mud, bruised and scratched, but I didn’t look much different from anyone else in the group, and I was fairly pleased that I had kept up for the entire two-hour mountain march.

We had about an hour of swimming, jumping and sliding around in the water and rocks. It was refreshing.

When we finished, I think it crushed everyone’s spirit to realize that we now had to climb 70 or 80 meters almost straight up the mountain. It was a climb that involved both feet and both hands. By now the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. When we reached the top of the climb we were out of the cool stream and away from the trees, walking in the full sun in the early afternoon and all the enjoyment of the previous hour was a distant memory.

I guess I’m prepared to admit that I may be at the end of my adventure tour days. There were moments of enjoyment in my mountain trek, but what I remember fondly are the moments of rest, not the hours of exertion.

(The South Africans and the energetic guide)

The trek ended on the last day with a trip on the river. We went white-water rafting… something I’ve wanted to do all my life but never managed to organize. I have, several times in my life, made tentative plans with friends to do the rubber raft on the river trip, but each time it fell through. So, the trip through the rapids of the Ping River in the mountains of Chiang Mai was my first rafting experience. I have to say it was enjoyable but anticlimactic. The rapids were fairly small and not particularly challenging… a bit like an amusement park ride, actually. I am sure that I would enjoy some more difficult rapids and I feel confident I could handle it.

So even as I say my adventure tours are behind me, I’m thinking of planning a more comprehensive rafting trip! I guess what I really mean is that I don’t think I’ll be walking in the mountains again; a shame, because all my life I’d wanted to go hiking in Nepal. That’s probably the first dream of mine that I’m going to have to relegate to the ‘never got to it’ list.

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I also spent about an hour riding an elephant for the first time in my life. It wasn’t as adventurous as I’d thought it might be. It was also a fairly slow and uncomfortable way to go — especially in the soft muddy ground of the rainy season when the elephant works pretty hard to move through the muddy patches. I don’t really recommend it as a transport option.

When it started to rain, we had natural umbrellas at hand. My elephant driver snapped a small branch from a tree and folded his leaf into a uniquely odd-looking hat that I recognized from Thai movies, fastening it with the twig. I couldn’t quite manage a photo of his hat, but it was very interesting.

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I’ve actually done a lot of cool shit in my life, so I guess I can live with scratching the mountains of Nepal off the ‘to do’ list. I’ve been scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, camel-riding & hiking in the Simpson Desert, camping in the blue ridge mountains, gambling in Las Vegas, motorcycling in Mexico, playing in the streets of Morocco, seen bullfights in Spain, been cliff diving in Kentucky, clambered through ancient temples in Cambodia, cruised the river in Laos, fed monkeys in Malaysia, been in a castle in Toronto, rode on the Maid of the Mist at Niagra Falls and elephants in Thailand, admired the beauty of Ha Long Bay in North Viet Nam, pee-ed in the canals of Amsterdam, drove 250 kmph on the autobahn in Germany, and had skiing lessons in Switzerland.

I suppose Nepal can wait until the next life.

I guess it’s hard to admit that time is forcing me to slow down a little. I guess the other alternative is to lose 20 kilos, get fit again and enjoy another ten years of active holidays. Maybe the struggle through the mountains of Chiang Mai will be just the kick in the ass I need to make that happen.

I’d always heard from people that the natural beauty of Thailand is in the north. I can say now that Chiang Mai City is a very picturesque place, but especially if you make the effort to get out into the mountains around the region you’ll find plenty of natural tropical mountain rain forests.

I’ll definitely be going back to explore the region more. I haven’t yet visited Mae Hon Song or Pai. I haven’t crossed over to Burma. And of course there’s always the opportunity to take a long slow boat ride to Luang Prabang in Laos. The region has a lot to offer, so if you get the chance, make the effort to go see it.

Now, as for my next vacation…. Hmmmm? Horse Riding in Mongolia?