Trek (Day two)

The following morning we all awoke and formed an orderly queue for the cold shower. After this we headed off on another walk over the hills through some amazing jungley jungle stopping off briefly at a sacred termite mound which Helmut bashed with a stick. Good idea Helmut.
The scenery here is quite spectacular and I couldn't help but feel as if we really had come somewhere untouched and that the rest of the World was so far away both in distance and in thought.
We stopped for a brief beer stop at an 'All Bar One' nesteld in the forest. Just joshing, it was a funky little hill village and it was around this point that Beth had a revelation... She'd done this exact trek before. The main reason she realised was that sitting beneath a hut was a woman weaving. It was the same woman. Weaving the same stuff. In the same place. Beth has an exact duplicate of this picture at home from five years before.



Lunch was taken at a kind of outpost like place where they keep the elephants for... well... elephant rides. We had to wait a while for ours as they only had two and we needed three. One of the drivers had wrapped his around a tree earlier that day and the other two needed refuelling and an emergency MOT.



Beth & I had done the elephant thing before so we let Lee take the drivers seat and sit on the poor beasts head. There were a few hairy moments when we went downward and realised that, unlike the previous occasion, we didn't have any kind of seat belt to keep us from toppling out. I could half see me doing a kind of comedy roll-slide out along the elephant's head and down his trunk to land legs akimbo in the dust.
The elephants trudged along and we all took snaps of each other whilst listening to Lee wax lyrical about everything from religion to the different species of bamboo until eventually we rounded a corner and caught a glimpse of our next destination. The picture before us was stunning. The river meandered past this incredible, stilted village that seemed to grow out of the side of the riverbank. It immediately put me in mind of all those Hollywood Vietnam war films, a rather sad image to conjure up. That night we again sat around a campfire watching Lucky make fools of us but this time we were treated our other guide's, (Soal), singing and guitar playing.
Again it was shockingly cold and I slept fitfully dreaming of elephants telling me how to grow bamboo, singing magicians, giant German termites and bloody roosters. The roosters sadly weren't a dream.