The mountains were unbelievable...towering majestic mountains with fresh mist rolling in. The altitude was so high that at times we walking inside clouds, which made the experience very surreal and dreamlike.
It is some of the most beautiful environment I have ever seen, but the trekking was extremely rugged and challenging...especially because it was raining on and off.
The greatest hardship was the blood-sucking leeches, which we cursed and pried off our feet in nausea every time we crossed a river.
We hiked about 10-18km a day through rivers, jungles, and mud...all the way up near the border of Myanmar (Burma).
We went to three different hill-tribe villages, and stayed in a bamboo hut in the second village for two nights.
Many of these backroads were used in the Vietnam war to exchange opium for weapons.
On the final day we decided to take a raft down the river for a few kilometers. Two men from the Karen hill-tribe led us for about an hour through knee-deep rivers and dense jungle.
They proceeded to make a raft from scratch solely out of bamboo and bamboo leaves; we watched them from the opposite shore in the pouring rain, doubtful if the raft would be stable in the strong current.
Sure enough, after launching off into the river we crashed hard into a log. One of the Boston kids fell out into the water. He was not injured, but soaking wet and pretty upset. The hill-tribe people led us back to shore, got out their knives and attached more bamboo to the raft to make it more structurally sound.
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