Tribal Trekking Scouting Trip

The adventures have begun for me in Thailand already! Brooke is coming in a few days, and I can't wait. The last week has been amazing though and has made the time without Brooke pass by fast. I got to Chiang Mai and stayed here for a few days getting settled in and getting some work done before heading north to Chiang Dao to start scouting the trail for my trekking trip this year. Chiang Dao is a small town at the base of a beautiful mountain. I grabbed a bus out of Chiang Mai and met my friend and fellow guide Koko at the bus station in Chiang Dao. We would use his house as our base to figure out our plan for the next few days. We needed to find a trail and villages to stay in across a 40 mile area of remote mountains. The original plan was to walk it, but we had no time for that. So, Koko talked to some friends and came back with 2 dirt bikes for us to take. The next few days were spent tearing around the back roads and trails on these dirt bikes. I didn't have much experience on a dirt bike and the trails were steep and muddy. This made for a really fast learning curve and I feel like a pro now. We stopped at a lot of villages along the way and found everything that we needed for the trip. It's going to be an awesome trip. This area is one of the most beautiful and protected areas of Thailand, and we decided that our service would be to keep it that way. We will be working with a forest research center to plant trees in a community forest while we are hiking. We will also be staying at and working on 2 different organic farms and staying in villages that only run off solar power.

At one of the villages, I have worked out for us to teach at the school when we are there. Koko and I spent one night there this time and I taught the kids for an hour or so. They all said that I was the first foreigner to ever come to the village, and were really excited to have me teach. It's great being able to go to villages that no one has ever been to before. Amazing that they still exist in this world. Especially somewhere as visited as Thailand!

Well, thats it for now. Things are crazy busy right now as all of our staff is starting to arrive. I will be training them over the next week about how to run our Come With Nothing trip. As part of that, we will be visiting villages all over to find the perfect ones to go to. Its going to fun, but very busy.... and the best part is, Brooke will be there for it!

More to come from both of us after the training/scouting for Come With Nothing is done.

written by

brookejason on June 7, 2009 from Chiang Dao, Thailand

from the travel blog: Thailand 2009

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