got to swim in a different waterfall everyday. Both nights were spent in different villages of the Karen people. It was so interesting to see their way of living. They go to bed at about 7:30 or 8pm and then they get up when the roosters start crowing at 3:30-4:00am...and the roosters basically don't stop crowing after that. Roosters have officially become one of my least favourite animals. Even here in the city they start that early...thank goodness for earplugs! Anyways, it was really cool to see the different villages and we even got to visit a village school which was also a boarding school for the children whose villages were too far away. One neat thing was that as a parent of a child that attends that school, you are required to help out in some way as a volunteer (whether it's maintenance, cooking, gardening etc. It seemed like a really neat set up (except for the part where they had their chicken coop set up over the fish pond so that they could raise their fish on the chicken poo.) It's kind of sad because you are only required by the government to go to school until you are 12 years old in Thailand and the only way you can go further than that is if you have a lot of money (not the case for any of the village children), or if you're really smart and you can go on scholarship.
The place where we spent the last night was absolutely incredible! We were on the top of a mountain and could see really far and a whole bunch of more mountains (terrible description, but I'm not sure how else to put it at the moment). You must check out the photos from there in our gallery . Right now, I think it ranks as my favourite corner of the world so far (maybe by the end of this trip I'll have a top ten or something).
Thanks to our guide we were able to try some fresh tropical fruits from the tree: tamarind (very sour), gooseberries, passionfruit, starfruit and bananas.
We ended off the trek with rafting down a river on a bamboo raft. That was a lot of fun. By the end we were all soaked due to waterfights and going over a waterfall (very small one mind you but it still flooded the whole raft).
David and Jisca were both quite carsick by the time we got back to Chiang Mai, but all in all, the trek was an awesome time.

Since we've been back in the city, we've moved to a different guest house...cheaper and it has a pool. We've spent most of our mornings relaxing by the pool and bombing around on our mopeds. We went to the local theatre on Friday and saw King Kong. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, it's definitely worthwhile. Peter Jackson has done it again in my mind...although some parts are extremely terrifying and I had to close my eyes.

Last night, we went out for dinner with the Japanese couple (Tadashi and Kazuko) that we met on the trek and another Japanese guy we met out there, Moto. They took us to a place (actually right next to the place where we took Win and Buoy) where we had "Thai Suki". That was an interesting experience. Basically, it's kind of like a fondue but you cook everything in a broth. So you go and pick your meats (everything from chicken and beef to squid and prawns), veggies, noodles and seasonings and you throw in everything at once (well noodles the last cause they cook the quickest). The point is not only to cook your stuff but also to flavour the broth and make a soup that you eat while you eat the meat, etc. Such a combination of flavours creates a very interesting soup. And you're not finished yet, when you've eaten everything out of your broth, you make a rice porridge with it. It was such a cool experience, we were totally stuffed! We also just felt so blessed by the friends we made, even though we couldn't always understand eachother. It's such a neat thing to cross paths with someone you would have never known otherwise and make a connection with them, even if it's just for a short time.

Tonight we're going again to the Sunday night market (a huge market, cheaper than most others, that only appears on Sunday nights) to stock up on a few more Chiang Mai products before we take off. It's a great place to try all sorts of different foods fromt he different street vendors too.

I guess that pretty much catches you up to where we're at right now. God has definitely been taking very good care of us. I don't know how much access to internet we'll have as we're travelling to our next destination (see entry called "Change of Plans") but we'll keep up to date as much as possible.