Settling Into a Herd

I despise tours. I dislike anything even remotely tour group-ish where I show up with a herd of other tourists, immediately and loudly pronouncing our tourist-ishness. I don't like having to follow other people around and follow someone else's schedule and, mostly, I don't like being paraded around from souvenier shop to souvenier shop to spend my money. Let me be clear and say that, yes, I am in fact aware that I AM a tourist. I just like to be as subtle and under the radar about it as possible. To try to go to "real" places and hang out with "real" people, never pulling out a map and never, ever wearing either a) a camera around my neck or b) white socks with sandals. That being said, today I joined a tour. I did it hesitantly, but I did it. And, in my defense, on the brochure it was called a "trek" instead of a tour, so that helped.

At some point, you just have to realize that occasionally someone else knows more about a place than you and can get you there a lot easier and faster than you can get yourself there, and with much less hassle. And when you want to do a lot of things in a short period of time, it's best to waste as little of precious travel time as possible. So we signed up at our hostel for the One Day Trek... and it was surprisingly very cool overall.

Sarah, Dani and I were the only ones from our little hostel but we picked up 6 other people along the way; with just nine of us total, I didn't think we could officially be declared a 'herd' of tourists, so that also made me feel better. It also helped that our mini-herd turned out to be super cool, a fun mix of British, Australians, Brazilians, French-Canadians and us.

I went into the day with an open mind, but they almost lost me right off the bat with the first two stops. A visit to an orchid/butterfly farm was totally random and, frankly, pointless. Well, the point was clearly to bring a group of tourists to a souvenier shop so I guess there technically WAS a point... but it wasn't making me change my thoughts about tours and it wasn't boding well for how the rest of the day was going to go for me. We then went to visit some tribal village communities, which was equally awkward for me. If it was something where we had somehow come upon it on our own or if we somehow knew someone who knew one of the people and we had been taken there, that would be one thing. I'm quite fascinated by the tribes and their way of life and would be genuinely interested in both learning about and seeing them. But to show up in a tour vehicle and walk up and down the row of huts, looking at them in their stands, them waiting for us with their wares out to sell to us... yeah, awkward. I wanted to take pictures on the one hand, but on the other I just couldn't. It was also a bit sad, in a way. Kind of like the Amish back home; it's a bit of a trade-off as the very thing that makes them a curiosity to people, what started off as simply being the way they live, is what they end up having to sell out a bit to tourists... so we get to see a bit of their life and they get to make a living off of it. It was all too disingenuous for me. As one person aptly described it, it was kind of like being "in a zoo, but with humans". I was more than happy to move on...

Bring on the elephants, baby! We went on about a 45-minute ride through the hills and trees. Other than the excitement that came when the guides were trying to kill a snake that was slithering in front of one of the elephants, it's a pretty low-key, slooow experience. But cool. Not every day I get to ride an elephant, after all. Kind of awesome to be sitting up there and have it lift its trunk up to you, waiting for a banana. And it will wait, seemingly indefinitely, until you give it one. Or five.

Lunch for fortification and then off to hiking. We walked about an hour into the woods before coming to a waterfall where we could mercifully jump in and cool off. The force of it provides a "Thai massage" of sorts, provided anyone could stand under the immense force of it for more than 5 seconds, that is.

An hour hiking back out and then... river rafting. We assumed it would be pretty tame, since they know it was a bunch of rookie tourists doing the rafting, but we hit some serious white water. At one point, I was OUT of the raft and had a real moment of "Huh. I am going to fall out of this raft" before barely pulling myself back in by the rope. Sarah had an equally thrilling moment a couple of minutes later. Good stuff.

Once we made it back to the hostel, we felt we clearly needed a massage. Obviously, after such a grueling day, we had earned it. Very coolly, we had also met back up with Jenny, the British girl we had roomed with back in Bangkok, so the four of us (our group keeps growing... !) went for ridiculously cheap massages and then to dinner.

Back at the hostel, we met up with some of our fun peeps from last night as well as some new ones. We hung out here for a long while before heading out in one big, massive herd to scope out some other local joints. I guess sometimes being part of a herd isn't that bad after all.