Bamboo Nests Day Two

Details of my door to the terrace in my bamboo nest

Today's hike would take us through a Lahu tribe village to the Huay Kaew waterfall to eat our packed lunch and then onto a ride by long tail boat on the Mae Kok river to visit the Akha hill tribe.

In the afternoon there would be time to enjoy the local hot springs.

Faithful Cookie, the dog who adopted us

View from the garden, from the website

Breakfast eggs

Toast brazier

Last night at dinner we met a personable Swiss medical engineer named Severino who joined us at breakfast.  His work was in a hospital inventing new machines and tools for surgeons to use.  He was 26 years old and had traveled to Nepal and Sri Lanka...the latter where Dave and I had been also.   One of the interesting things about wandering is to meet others and hear their stories which I got to do around the bonfire the night before. 

Severino from Switzerland meets us at breakfast

Nok at the counter after breakfast

Looking at the bonfire site in the morning

View from the morning trek

After lunch meeting back with Noi and his dogs

Log across the path that got Dave in the forehead as his hat was covering his eyes.

I had already heard that the school we were to visit  that day was closed for a national holiday.  I did get to interact with some of the kids with my irresistible sticker books before we started the hike though.  
 So after saying our goodbyes to Severino, and seeing the kids, we started our trek to a Lahu village where we paused to talk with one of the locals and hear from Noi about the Catholic influence of this particular tribe.

 After lunch we were led to a long tail boat to visit the Akha hill tribe.   The boatman however soon deemed the water too shallow to navigate so we turned the boat back to where we had boarded.   It was a nice little interlude on the water though...with our pack of dogs.   The Kok is a river from Burma and Thailand and a tributary of the Mekong.  The boatman was very skilled in getting us around the rocks and not scraping his vessel.

 We did sit in the hot spring for a little while ( not hot enough when the water got to the pool) and then headed back to camp a bit early... happy to relax, read and pack for the airport before the sun went down and dinner was served.  
We were well satisfied with our trip to the top of Thailand. 
 Tomorrow we would take a plane back to Bangkok and then a drive east to the Khao Yai National Park area.