In the jungle, the mighty jungle the lion sleeps tonight.

Chiang Mai has turned out to be lovely area with lots of friendly locals and travellers. I have spent an unfortunate amount of time in internet cafes writing a short-term fellowship application, which has been interesting with skype calls and a lot of noise all around me. It always takes a little while to get into the project proposal writing, as I write about myself and my science with normal sense of modesty. Why is it so difficult to say that the work you do is top quality?

In between the fancy words about science I managed to do a two-day trek in Doi Inthanon national park. When I was booking I asked for a trek with slow pace and not very much steep uphill climbs, as I am not the sportiest of the lot. The trekking turned out to be slightly different; the first hour was steep uphill climb with a reasonable pace (and after that two lovely hours of even ground), and the second day was two and half hour steep descend with really brisk pace. I guess you can't get around the uphill if you're going on a hill, but I didn't understand why we had to run through the second day without opportunities to look the nature we had come to see.

The surroundings were absolutely beautiful. The forest (the guide called it jungle, but it didn't match my perception of jungle really) offered lovely shade, and the waterfalls and fields we passed gave nice variety to the views. The waterbuffaloes had wooden bells on their necks, and they provided gentle background music day and night, combined with grasshoppers and roosters. We had an opportunity to swim in a waterfall on the way, but the water was freezing cold! The lunch and dinner were purchased from a local market; lunch was bagged fried rice and dinner was cooked from fresh ingredients by our guide. The overnight stop was at a Karen hilltribe village, where we had one big wooden house filled with mattresses and mosquite nets. The kitchen and the toilet were very basic, but the guide smartly cooked us a lovely green curry with chicken and Thai eggplant as well as tofu with beansprouts on a huge cast-iron wok heated by a campfire. After the dinner the local children sang Karen songs to us, and we sat with a guitar by the campfire until late in the night. I really enjoyed getting out of town, getting some fresh air and excercise and seeing the way how local tribes live. There was also some touristy elements; elephant riding and bamboo rafting through a lovely river with a relatively fast current, but I enjoyed the other bits much more!

The trekking group was a good mix of different ages and nationalities, and people were friendly and interested in discussing a huge variety of topics by the campfire - everything from the meaning of marriage to life after death. The unfortunate side of the group was four Spanish bodybuilders who did not understand English very much and behaved in rude fashion towards fellow trekkers and the locals. They would continously chatter, shout and whistle in very lound Spanish (loudness on its own is already impolite to Thais), act aggressively (e.g. beating the trees with their bamboo walking sticks) and refuse to eat the offered food ("not enough protein") or to pay attention to the local children singing to us. They did not have a sense of what to wear, going topless in the village and in the restaurant where we had lunch the second day. They also would use their rudimentary English to show off to an attractive Dutch girl in the group ("tonight you sleep with me") but not for anything else. Of course they thought they were really funny. What we thought was really funny is that when we turned up to the overnight camp the Spaniards started acting confused, and it turned out that they had thought the trek was only for one day. They had not prepared for overnight in a village, and came down shouting to our guide "Hotel! Hotel!" and were not too happy about the "Manana!" reply.

Speaking about tomorrow, there is a big reggae festival near Chiang Mai going on and I might go over there for a day, just like every other traveller in town!