No wet, no fun

Hayo again from Chiang Mai! It's the end of our third day here, and we're starting to feel like we know our way around. The Kanatoke (I can't remember how to spell it now) dinner was awesome - we were picked up from our guest house (any time you book a tour or anything else here they pick you up - our guest house also transported us from the airport to town - I've never been one of the people with a sign made for them with a driver waiting (no, the time Sabrina and I made one out of a napkin for Melanie doesn't count), so that was sweet. It's the little things.) Anyway, the dinner was cool - good food, no crazy unidentifiable meats (or at least none that we were aware of, so it's cool), and lots of traditional dancing, etc. It was seriously a bang for our buck- things here are inexpensive, but this was lots of culture jam-packed into a couple of hours. Yay! The next morning we headed out on our day trek. A frienly Thai guide named Ramu led us, and explained that we'd be visiting an elephant camp, two hill-tribe villages and would then go rafting. It was a full day of stuff- and more exercise than Beth or my sorry grad-school accustomed-to-sitting-and-typing-and-snacking selves had seen in a long time. But we held our own, and had an awesome time! Riding an elephant was rad- we got to feed it bananas, and I think it liked us (as much as an elephant can like people who ride it); the hiking was cool (it poured rain part of the time! bring on the monsoons, yo), the hill-tribe villages were interesting and pretty eye-opening and the "rafting"... was really more Thai guides dunking helpless unsporty girls into the water repeatedly. Beth's little girl squeals every time the guide tipped the raft over made us easy targets; we were completely soaked by the end. :) The Thai rafting guides kept yelling, "no wet, no fun" ... indeed. Despite that... trip on the river was amazing - so much beautiful scenery; so many elephants, water buffalo and rice paddies! Back at our guest house, we passed out, then stumbled to dinner and enjoyed our first for-real monsoon rainstorm. Sitting at an outdoor restaurant (with a romantico candle and everything), the rain beat down on the tin roof and lightning flashed; all of the other tourists and us were so excited; the Thai staff laughed at us. Today we took it easy...the nice woman at our guest house called her friend, a red-truck taxi driver, who agreed to take us to a nearby craft village called Ban Wai. As we were about to leave, she decided to come along, which made the trip even cooler. She answered lots of our questions about the things around us, and we shopped with her for new linens for the guest house's attached restaurant. After a couple of hours of shopping, we were tired, and bought water from one of the craft vendors. When the lady saw us sitting on the curb nearby drinking our water, she insisted that we come sit on itty-bitty plastic chairs that she had. Then she plugged in a fan for us. So nice! (our glistening butter-skin scores!) When we got back to town, we went to visit a few wats, wrote some postcards and went night bazaaring again. "same same" t-shirts were purchased. Tomorrow we leave Chiang Mai to go back to Bangkok - where pictures will be posted! Thanks for the comments and love - hugs to you all. Amy