The Trek

We thought we had found quite a special place in Annie's "Darling Guesthouse". There where a few long term residents (two true hippies, and some young Austrian women who were sticking around for a few months), and the whole place felt more like a small family than a guesthouse. We asked one of the hippies about trekking in Pai, and she replied that Annie was a licensed trekking guide and would probably organize a great trek - off the beaten path, very small, and a great deal of fun. Mind you, she had never trekked with Annie herself, and as such didn't really know of what she spoke. And we, being fools, listened. When we asked Annie about it, her face lit up. She was excited to go on a trek, we would go visit some friends of hers in a Lahu village where other tourists almost never went. We would leave tomorrow morning, 6:30a.m. She didn't reveal any more information, and when asked, she would simply say that we would trek for 3 days, and it would be fun.

We woke up on Day 1, extremely early, a little tired but nonetheless ready to go. As we finished packing, Annie (the guesthouse owner and trek leader) came in sobbing. She explained that she had gone out the night before to run errands and see some friends, while carrying an obscene amount of money that she had meant to use early this morning to pay for construction supplies for a new addition to her facility. But she woke up in the morning, realized that the money was gone, and now had to scramble to figure out where she had lost the cash, and could we please wait a day to go trekking? Of course, we told her, we would be happy to wait a day (Pai is a great place to kill a day) while she straightened things out. We helped her through the next few hours, gave her shoulders to cry on, and Jarrad (the Aussie) drove her around while she retraced her steps and contacted the police. Of course we all avoided the obvious question - what kind of idiot goes out carrying a small fortune? As we later discovered, Annie is not the most logical thinker we've ever met.

By that night Annie was slowly coming to terms with the fact that the money was gone, and she announced that the trek would begin the next morning. She asked everyone to meet at her bungalow at 6:50 the next morning. We tried to ask questions: where exactly would we go, what would we do on the trek (most treks include elephant riding, rafting, and visits to multiple villages, with a few hours of light hiking interspersed among them). Annie was vague, but we thought all would work out for the best.

We awoke on Day 2, same extremely early hour, grabbed our packs, and headed up to the main house. Annie was puttering around, and as I was the first one there she asked me how much water I thought we would need - two bottles each, or three. I told her that I didn't know where we were going, what the route was like, and how long it would take. She didn't offer any more information. I said that without knowing more, we should take as much water as we could carry - at least 3 bottles each. The Aussies arrived shortly afterwards. The two Austrian girls (Ullie and Evelyn) were a little slower out the gate. We went to round them up at 6:45, and by 7:00am we were all ready to go. We piled into Annie's pickup truck and drove into town. We arrived at the bus station at 7:10, which is exactly where and when things started to go wrong. Apparently Annie hadn't arranged to rent four-wheel drive vehicles. She had chartered a single minibus and instructed them to meet us at the station at 7am. However, since Annie had blown them off the day before, the driver had only waited until the agreed time, 7a.m., before taking off to look for a more reliable customer. Annie ditched all of us except Ullie at the corner, saying it wasn't a problem, and headed back to the guest house. She returned in about 45 minutes having repacked some of the food into a new backpack weighing some 20 kilos. Ullie had swapped her small bag for her large trekking pack, which had also been loaded with some of our food and water and weighed as much as the new pack. Annie asked us all to pile into the back of her pickup again, we would use it as our vehicle for the next three days. Apparently this would not be a jeep trek.

Annie's pickup truck is, charitably, a piece of shit. It's an old Nissan that has seen many years of bad driving (Annie drives a stick only slightly better than I do), and had been washed away in a flood at least once. The thermostat was busted so the engine tended to overheat in mountainous terrain if not driven carefully. Off we went.

Since Pai is in a valley surrounded by gorgeous and imposing mountains and since the roads involve steep grades and hairpin turns, we overheated about an hour out of town. Fortunately we were at a gorgeous lookout. I have never seen anywhere as shockingly green as Thailand during the wet season. The hills are exploding with different shades of green, and every available inch is covered in new growth, brilliant and vibrant and indescribably lush. We kicked back for around an hour, waiting for the engine to cool sufficiently so that we could add some water and be on our way. The rest of the drive was mostly downhill, at least for the next hour, and since the uphills only kicked in again after the engine had a chance to cool, we managed to arrive at out starting point without overheating a second time (though it was close).

At 11:30a.m. we pulled into a small Lahu family compound on the Pai river, near a point popular with rafters. We got out of the car, Annie went in to chat with her friends, and we met the guide that she had arranged. He is a charming, largely silent, Lahu man from the village we were to trek to, and as we discovered later, he is an absolute machine. Nothing phased him, he just smiled as he hefted two packs (!), one on his back, one on his front, inspected his machete, and began to walk. Jarrad and I both shouldered the big packs (some 20 kilos each), and off we went. We walked up the road in the sweltering noon heat, and within ten minutes we were sweating. The air is thick and humid in the wet season, and a rainstorm is always just around the corner. After a relatively short walk up the road, we ventured off onto a dirt footpath, through a river for a few minutes, then alongside it in shallow mud. Within twenty minutes we were veering away from the river, and everyone was sweating profusely as the path moved from a 15 degree grade to around 20 or 30 degrees. Thereafter the grade varied between 30 and 45 degrees for most of the rest of the day. No exaggeration. There were only a few flat bits along some ridge lines, and then towards the very end. At least 80% of the trek was spent going up and down (mostly up) very steep paths.

As soon as we left the river Annie and the guide struck up a brief but animated conversation. In turned out that Annie had not spoken with the guide about the particulars of the route and had expected to walk the whole way along the river. Apparently the guide told her that during the wet season that path was impassable, he had another route in mind. No one but Annie and the guide spoke Thai (and he spoke it poorly as his first language was Lahu), so their conversation was relayed later by Annie, to Emily (the Australian woman) in a self-serving and rather cursory fashion. We asked Annie how far we were hiking, and she said that the guide thought it was 35km. The average person walks, unencumbered, at between 4 and 5 kilometers an hour. You can barely cover 35km on flat ground, and that's if you walk all day. Knowing the 35km figure to be bullshit, we just kept walking, figuring that we'd get there when we got there. We spent the next half hour or forty minutes struggling through patches of incredibly thorny plants, still fighting the steepness. (Fortunately, we found ourselves eating the same thorny plants in a soup two days later so we got our revenge) By the end of this first hour and a bit we had all exerted ourselves far beyond expectations, and certainly beyond what was normal for a tourist trek in the north of Thailand. There are proper mountaineering treks, but that's not what anyone had envisioned. Everyone was already dripping sweat, and we literally wrung out our t-shirts and watched a pool of water form at our feet. We asked Annie how much further, she spoke to the guide, and then said about 20km. It didn't sound so bad. If by the guide's reckoning we had just covered 15km in an hour and a half, then surely the whole trek would be a little over three hours, getting us into the village in the mid-afternoon. But Emily was suffering from shortness of breath, and couldn't go on. Annie wasn't looking great either. She offered to walk Emily back, and she would drive on to the Lahu village.

Jarrad and I were incredulous! There was a road to this village? Why in bloody hell were we carrying 20 kilo packs with two days worth of food and water in excruciating heat and humidity if we could have just driven the supplies to the village? Annie and Emily switched packs with us, and the plan was to have them meet us at our endpoint - the Lahu village of Wae San (pronounced "Wee San", and not marked on any maps). At least, I think that's what our endpoint was called. It's the name that our Lahu guide kept using, and it was either the name of his village or the Lahu word for home. At any rate, Emily and Annie set off back down the path.
For the next half hour we labored upwards, stopping briefly a few times, before finally pausing to rest a while and drink at least one litre of water each. We asked the guide, this time in sign language and with gestures at wrist watches, how much longer it would be. The answer was three. Three what? Jenna and Jarrad thought he meant 3:00pm. Ullie, Evelyn, and I thought he meant three more hours. Wanna guess who was right?

By three we were all absolutely exhausted, and becoming a little concerned. 3 p.m. found us in a rice field on a very steep hill, approaching the first summit of the day (two more were to follow, although they were connected by short ridge lines that dropped only a few hundred feet between peaks). We had already decided that this was "bullshit", far more exertion than anyone had signed on for or been mentally prepared for. We now had only a Lahu guide whom we couldn't commnicate with, didn't really know how much longer we would be trekking, and had finished about half the water we had with us. Evelyn was fighting for breath and needed to stop continually. Jarrad and I had worn ourselves down with the large packs during the first hour and a half, and the next hour and a half didn't help things. We stopped and took some photos in the rice field. Despite our discomfort the view was incredible, and we set about enjoying our little break. Then things got worse.

We walked on a few more minutes, then our guide lost the path. We backtracked through a banana field, and into the rice again. I think that our guide knew exactly where home was, but didn't know where the paths were to get there. He basically looked at the peak we were on, the next one over, and seemed to draw a line bisecting them. I think he knew that along that ridge there lay a path, but didn't know quite how to get from here to there. He ended up losing the path two more times over the next hour, and it was a brutal slog. From the rice field on there was no real path to speak of. Our guide was literally bushwhacking, cutting out every step with his machete. The walk was becoming decidedly less of an adventure and far more troublesome than anyone had bargained for.

The rest of the hike was absolutely miserable. While the scenery was stunning (dramatic views of valleys on each side, trees covered in hundreds of orchids) our condition was poor. The path along the ridge lines was quite sketchy at points. We cut past a small farm in a valley - one house, a pig pen, and about a dozen chickens scurrying about, turned through a dramatic limestone gulley, climbed out of it, and continued on. After 5 hours of absolutely brutal hiking we finally hit the road leading to the Lahu village. Our guide had more than earned his keep. Evelyn was wiped, Jarrad and I were fading fast, and even Jenna, who is in top physical shape, had been pushed near her limit for the day. A half hour walk along the road finally ended at the Lahu village. The road had us worried - it was steeper in places than the roads that had burned out Annie's engine earlier in the day. But the village looked fantastic - we climbed down the final hill into the valley, scared a small herd of village pigs that were lying in the road, crossed a log bridge, passed under a "spirit gate" (to keep out the bad ones), and entered Wae San.

I've never been so glad to see a place with no running water and a smoky cooking hut in my life!
We quickly discovered our problems hadn't ended - Annie and Emily had never arrived! It turned out Annie had never even driven to this village before and had no idea what the road was like. With awful thoughts of a car wreck in our heads, we frantically tried to communicate to our guide and his fellow villagers that we needed to borrow a scooter and go look for Annie and Emily. Jenna saved the day by drawing out a picture of a car wreck on a bandage wrapping, and Jarrad hopped onto the back of a villager's scooter to go find his girlfriend and Annie. The rest of us, realizing that there was nothing we could do, headed down to the river to wash the sweat and dirt off.

While we were bathing, Jarrad got a first hand look at exactly what the whole road looked like. Past the spot that we had cut onto it was even worse - part of it was eroding, and there were ruts and mossy patches that made it almost undriveable in parts. "Sketchy" doesn't even begin to describe it. Jarrad and his Lahu driver, both experienced motorcyclists, skidded out at one point and the motorbike's front wheel started going offroad and down a cliff. The driver hit the brakes, and both he and Jarrad vaulted off the back and grabbed at the rear of the bike. They managed to wrestle it back onto the road and kept going. Another 15 minute drive brought them to a big muddy patch. Annie had nearly overheated her engine and had spun the front-passenger side of the truck off the road into a ditch. Both she and Emily were fine, but the car was stuck until someone could get to another village in the morning and get help. Between the villager carrying Jarrad and another man who came up from behind they managed to load five people and two large packs onto the two bikes, and made a terrifying return trip to Wae San, arriving a little after dark.

We were overjoyed to see Jarrad and Emily, and while we were all happy to find Annie safe and sound, we couldn't quite find the words for the situation. Over dinner (cooked chicken, fried green beans and a liver curry, all of which we had brought with us), Annie said that she was glad everyone was in Wae San, and that we shouldn't worry about her truck. We had all our food, and the next day she would deal with the truck while we and our guide did an 8 hour trek to some nearby waterfalls. We politely but firmly told Annie that a continuation was out of the question. We would be turning back in the morning for Pai.

That night was ours to enjoy in Wae San. The place was incredible - we had wanted the authentic experience, and we sure got it. To cut it short we spent a long and unforgettable night drinking homemade whisky, grousing about the day, and barely sleeping. The next morning I wandered around the village and saw village life - old people in traditional garb, toothless women feeding scratch to the chickens, two women having a fight while the whole village turned out to watch (from the hand gestures our guide made to me as we cleaned our morning vegetables, it seemed to be about his decision to sleep in one house instead of another) a man slaughtering a rooster (I was invited to breakfast, but we had already accepted at another house and I couldn't ditch), pigs rooting around the toilet, etc. Really, the place was something special.

We left after breakfast. It took four hours to walk back along the road to the next village, at least two hours of which was a steep and winding downhill. We all got to see what the bikes had covered the night before. It became clear exactly how irresponsible Annie had been - there was no bloody way her truck would ever have made the trip, and she had wandered in, with responsibility for six other people, completely oblivious.

The next few hours were frustrating. We were exhausted and just wanted to be home. Instead, when we pulled into the village and found Annie with her truck, she told us to wait at the convenience store while she would just be next door with a friend who had been expecting us. Tired, hungry, and incredibly thirsty, we told her we were ready to go straight back to Pai and would wait. In the meantime we raided the convenience store for water, beer, and junk food - anything with sugar and a high calorie count. We glutted ourselves for around an hour, and then Annie came back. We expected to heave ourselves into the back of the truck and head back to Pai. Instead it turned out that Annie had been using the last of our food to cook lunch with her friend for us - "it's a surprise!". We'd had more than enough surprises, but not wanting to offend the family we sat down to eat a meal that no one had any appetite for (and which was actually quite bad, consisting of a bland chicken and potato curry and some salted greens and pork that had been in our backpacks for the better part of two days). It was just par for the course, another example of Annie's inability to communicate, even when asked direct questions.
The way back to Pai felt a little better. Annie overheated the car again. After the engine cooled down we put her in the back with the girls and Jarrad drove the rest of the way. We finally got back to the guest house, made immediate plans to leave Pai with Jarrad and Emily, showered, and headed into town to begin recuperating.

All in all a strange learning experience. We're definitely laughing now and are fine. On to Laos.