Sept 29/30 Overnight in Akhu Village some trekking in jungle & white temple

The guesthouse we are staying at is Baan Bua guesthouse, they do have an website it's here . It's a cute little place in the city that seems so quiet and relaxed from the business of the streets.

So to continue from last post, we took a long tail boat on the river to the elephant visitor place. The elephant ride Dean & i took was for 30 mins in the little village outside of Chaing Rai, it was okay great scenary different to ride an elephant as you feel all the muscles move. Dean sat as the driver and he felt the scratchy hair on his legs the entire ride. 30 mins was enough of a ride and we paid 400baht which works out to about 12.50CAN. From there we took Jeep up to the hilltribe villages. Got to see how they lived. We slept overnight at the Akha village about 3:00pm, we had a deck type area to chill out at, while the father made tea and coffee for us. We spent the night up on the deck most the time, Noi our guide mentioned we could walk around but we didn't do too much that night. The sun went down about 5:00pm. We had an awesome supper of rice, soup, pork.

As we arrived on a night before a celebration, everyone had firecrackers. Mostly the ones that made noises. All the kids and adults seemed to look for a place to make it sound the best. The firecrackers are meant to scare of spirits.
We slept in the area of the deck, i dislike sleeping on a mattress on a hardfloor. I had to do yoga in the morning for my body not to hurt. The rosters started their
called about 6 and seemed to keep making noise until 9. In the morning, after breakfast we went for ahike up the mountain to see the plantations. Coffee, Tomatoes, all sorts of vegetation. Our guide Noi, had a friend of his take us up for the hike and OMG, i should have gotten into better shape. The uphill was killer and this cold is still hanging on so i can't seem to breath good yet. I thought the going up part was hard but the going down was almost worse cause my hamstring felt like i pulled it. We had lunch and then hiked up to the waterfall. That was about a 1 mile uphill and that was not as tough but i still needed some breaks. The waterfall was beautiful. It was so nice, would have been nice to go down to the bottom but the mist would have completely drenched our clothes. We still had to visit the white temple at the end of the trek. Man it was beautiful. It was different as the mural on the inside of the temple was pop art. It was to represent all the current temptations that we need to resist to reach enlightenment. Wish i could have taken pics but not allowed inside a temple/wot. I have a brochure that will show more detail. They had the twin towers with a snake coiling itself around them. Star Wars figures like Jabba the Hut, The Matrix, cellphone, watches, and other things. We got to the temple at about 5:00 and it was a cloudy day and Dean got some good shots. As i needed an immediate toilet when we got out of the jeep i didn't have time to grab my camera or more time to take better pics of the temple. Hoping the pictures do it justice. i purchases some amazing pics from the gallery. Got back to guesthouse about 5 and it was so nice to have a long shower as i felt so hot and dirty.