Nan

In Nan we decided to do some adventuring and the guidebook recommended Fhu Travel. We wanted to do a 2 day trip with hiking and river rafting, but with just two people, it was too expensive. We went to the nearby morning market to try and round up some more farang to go with us. I spotted a couple that had been on the bus with us from Phrae and noticed they were eating khanom krog (a delicious breakfast sweet) for the first time. Using food as a conversation stater, we chatted with them for a while, but ultimately chickened out when it came to asking them about the rafting trip. Fhu Travel was closing soon, so we went back and instead decided to sign up for a 1 day jungle hike.

The next morning the guides picked us up in a jeep at our hotel and to our surprise, the couple from the market had signed up for the same trip. There were two guides who never told us their names. They were both young, one thin, and one larger and more muscular. It was soon apparent that they were both tricksters, especially the bigger one. On the drive, they pointed out different crops and plants we drove by, and then the big guy pointed at a motorcycle and said "Tiger" and then laughed and said "No, Thai girl!"

The thin one led the hike and made us all walking sticks out of fresh bamboo using his machete skills while the big guy made his banana into a pig puppet for us (I'm still trying to figure that trick out).

The first half of the hike was through bamboo and dipterocarp forest. They showed us termite mounds, an ant-lion trap, and they even cut open a big stem of bamboo to harvest bamboo grubs, which people in Thailand love to deep fry and eat. Another trick they showed us is how to take this grass, which was a lot like pampas grass, and make a little dart launcher out of it. We had contests to see who could launch their grass stem the farthest. The guides had a lot of fun scaring us and scaring each other and shooting their slingshot at red ant nests in the trees. They also had us taste this fruit called a broad olive.

It was about the size of a small lime and was one of the most bitter and astringent things I've ever tasted in my life.


Lyndsay, of course, liked it. They said that if you ate it, water would taste sweet afterwards. The water did taste a little sweet, but it was barely worth eating that thing.

The giant bamboo was beautiful, and we also saw some other great plants. I spotted this flower and immediately grabbed it to take a closer look.


Then I heard the guide shout "DON'T TOUCH IT!" Apparently this flower could give you a very very itchy rash. They helped me rinse my hands off and I was somehow rash free. Here are some other flowers we saw.



The second half of the hike was through slashed and burned forest converted to corn production. It was still beautiful--Lyndsay didn't even notice the corn at all.



We ended up at a hill tribe village where the kids thought Lyndsay was Thai (a Tiger) and the bigger guide put some berries in my hand and squeezed.


They showed us different plants and fruit trees growing in the village including this flower that Thais use in making garlands. Aren't they cool? I think its a milkweed species.


We stopped for a snack consisting of a soda, a quarter of a pineapple per person, and some fishy, sweet, chewy things on a stick that I liked a lot. We were so full after eating all this since for lunch we had pork and rice with si ew sauce and they had given us a whole hand of bananas and a bag of som (Thai oranges) to eat on the hike!

On the drive back we stopped at a paper making place as a surprise. The paper was made from a tree bark and was used for making paper flowers.

Then they pulled off the road again at a temple. We though this was another surprise stop, but they told us to stay in the jeep and they both jumped out excitedly to pick some fruits from a tree. They brought them back and the big guy stuck his fingernail through the skin of the fruit making it bleed a milky sap. Lyndsay has forbade me from posting a picture of this fruit on the blog, so all I'll say is that it was somewhat obscene and pretty hilarious. The funniest part though, was that they stopped at this temple just to show us this trick with the fruit.

We had such a great time and really loved our guides. They really had a lot of fun doing their jobs which made the trip great for us. I'm really sad we never got their names, so we can't specifically recommend them to anyone, but Fhu Travel seemed like a pretty good place.

When we got back from the trip we signed up for a full day of kayaking with the same company. There were no guides this time, just a two person kayak and a lunch for each of us. They drove us up the river and we were to paddle back at our leisure.



After a while of floating, we realized we weren't really getting anywhere with just the current pushing us. We started paddling. The river was so slow that we had to paddle almost the entire way and it still took us more than 6 hours (they had told us 4-6 hours). It was pretty scenery, but after 6 hours of paddling, we were getting pretty tired of seeing the same riverside gardens and fishermen. No more kayaking on this trip.

The food in Nan was pretty good too. They had a great morning market that had a variety of things we didn't really see anywhere else. One of the weirdest things we saw was live bee larvae and pupae. These are supposedly a delicacy and the couple that went on the hike had tried them (and somehow thought we were adventurous for having tried fried crickets). This was also the first time we had fried chicken in Thailand. Now I understand why Wat Mongolratanaram in Berkeley (AKA "The Buddhist Temple") serves fried chicken--Thailand knows how to do it right. We also happened to be there during a food festival by the river. It had a lot of beer food like grilled clams, fried peanuts, fried spring rolls, and various fish, pork, and chicken meatballs on skewers. There was a pretty awful middle-school aged band there playing traditional music through extremely loud speakers. Lyndsay and I escaped the noise and walked along the river and listened to the frogs sing instead.