Karma is apparently reading this blog. The day after my glib "stay out of the tuk tuk" comment, Clare and I nearly died in a tuk tuk. We were headed to the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar, zipping down a side street in the back of the three-wheeled death traps they call transport in this country when a car pulled out of an alley at top speed headed straight for my side of the tuk tuk. Truth be told, I screamed. Though really it was just the noise that results from your entire body flexing in preparation for impact.

Needless to say we are fine. The tuk tuk swerved, the car braked, it was a fairly ordinary Thai intersection. But it was full five minutes of white knuckle gripping and fish out of water mouth flapping before we could speak. At which point Clare turned to me and said, "Your scream is surprisingly girly." Nice. At least now we have the answer to my father's eternal question of when I will start to behave like a lady: moments before my death.

When we got to the market, we frantically piled out of the tuk tuk and in to the nearest place serving alcohol. In Thailand that is everywhere. Emboldened by our brush with death, we ordered a completely inexplicable dish involving leaves, ginger, toasted coconut, and the tiniest little peppers I had ever seen. Granted size is not everything, but these things really seemed too small to do much harm. So I dared Clare to eat one. Hysterical. She chugged her wine, her water, my water, my beer, and then panted for a while muttering something that sounded like "pepper ... hot... shit ... hot." Fantastic show. I wish I had the after photo for this one.

Our second day in Chiang Mai we spent the morning at the beautiful mountaintop temple of Doi Suthep, built in the 14 th century and still in active use by Buddhist monks. We arrived just in time for the morning prayers, which involve a dozen orange robe-clad monks chanting unison. It's very meditative. Unless you have a short attention span and an overactive imagination. We didn't last long.

In the afternoon, we took a trip into the rainforest north of Chiang Mai to do a ziplining tour of a beautiful stretch of forest that was previously off limits to visitors because it was a protected habitat. The ziplines are apparently some kind of eco-friendly compromise to keep visitors off the forest floor. Or else they are an expensive tourist trap. Either way they are really fun and we spent the afternoon flying through the sky and repelling down 1500 year old trees in the lushest forest I have ever seen.

Day three is when the real adventure began-- the jungle trek! (Editorial note: Clare caught a little flu bug and left a day after me for the trek so we weren't together for this part but had some similar experiences. You will have to pump her for the gritty details of her trek).

A quick geography lesson to start: the Northern Provinces of Thailand are a mountainous and jungle-covered region that form the lower part of the Golden Triangle-- the intersection of Burma, Laos, and Thailand best known for its agricultural contributions to the drug trade and resulting violent turf wars. The Thai government has since intervened and persuaded at least some of the region's farmers to grow rice, corn, and pumpkins instead of opium. The jungle in these provinces is dense and there are few passable roads between villages. So if you want to see the Thai jungle, you have to do it on foot. So off I went (with a group, and a guide, I haven't lost my mind).

Part one was a concession to our inner tourists. We rode elephants. In a circle. But they are gorgeous and massive creatures with lovely, knowing eyes and an insatiable appetite for bananas. And you cannot leave Thailand without riding an elephant.

The actual trek started off as a 13 km hike up the side of a mountain. I like a good challenge, so game on. Then the monsoon started. I've never seen rain like this before. You couldn't see your own hand at arms length. In no time the narrow rocky path up the mountain had transformed into a waterfall down the mountain. But onward we went, sliding in the mud, grasping at tree trunks, and quickly realizing that rain coats are no match for rain that comes from every direction simultaneously.

The rain stopped after about an hour, just as we reached the top of the mountain. Within minutes, the jungle reanimated. The birds started screeching in the trees. Frogs hopped between soggy branches. Giant ant-like insects the size of hummingbirds, with black wings and beakish antennae, rose from the mud and took flight all around us. It was fantastically old testament.

The reward for our efforts was perfectly timed. As the sun came out, we reached a gorgeous waterfall at the foot of a rice field. After rinsing off under the falls we set up yet another mountainside to the village where we would spend the night. Our guide, who went by "Ka" though that was certainly not his name, explained that the hill tribes are made up of people who immigrated to Thailand from China, Laos, and Burma and set up insular communities in the Thai jungle. These communities have developed their own languages and customs. The first village we stayed in was people of Chinese descent who spoke a tribal language that even our Thai guides did not know beyond simple courtesies.

For anyone who doubts Clare's or my ability to rough it, these jungle accommodations were no joke. Squatting outhouses, bare wooden floors with mosquito nets, and spiders the size of your hand.

But it was a lot of fun. I spent the first evening sitting by a campfire with our guide and a few of the locals who brought a guitar, singing some American classics (Hotel California is a real favorite on this side of the world) and enjoying some Thai serenade. And to keep the mosquitoes away, I was forced to drink Thai rice whisky-- a bathtub brew that smells like moonshine and tastes like battery acid. I'm not sure that it keeps the bugs away, but sleep comes quickly, which is a blessing when the jungle sounds like it's three feet from your mosquito net and hungry.

The next day was the longest and most ill-advised of my life. For nearly seven hours we traipsed through the jungle, led by Ka who used a large stick to beat out a path where none had been before. As he explained to us a number of times when we were clearly lost, he liked to learn new ways through the jungle. Perfect, me too. Ka's brother joined our trek as well, but he didn't speak English so he mostly ran through the jungle waving a hatchet and laughing manically. True story. Both brothers took every available opportunity to pick up bugs, eat leaves and wild berries, and pretend something had attacked them. It was hardly a necessary addition to our adventure considering we were already slipping down muddy inclines, balancing on fallen logs over rushing ravines, and free climbing mountains miles from civilization. But who doesn't love a good snake attack joke, I always say.

For anyone who doubts the precise nature of this trek, the picture below is Ka, ahead of me, making a "path" in the jungle.

Threats to life and limb aside, the scenery was incredible along the way.

The second night we stayed beside the waterfall, in the thick of the jungle. Ka and his brother, along with some other people who mysteriously appeared in the night, set about killing everything they could find to barbecue over the campfire-- fish and frogs from the river as well as an impressively large snake. It's enough to make one a vegetarian. Dinner turned into revelry again as the rice whisky was passed around and we practiced a number of (likely obscene) phrases in Thai and the local tribal languages. In keeping with Buddhist practices, Ka would always pour out a small amount of whisky or set aside a bite of food as an offering for the spirits in the jungle. I made the mistake of trying to make a cultural analogy, and spent the next twenty minutes trying to explain what "pour one out for my homeys" meant. It's not Buddhism, that much is now clear.

Here's where I get serious for a second. Sitting around a campfire, next to the roar of the waterfall, under a blanket of stars, with these young Thai men who basically live in the jungle and forage for food, it seemed entirely possible that life does not have to be so complicated. Or maybe things just look simpler at the bottom of a bamboo cup of rice whisky.

The third day of the trek was more of the same: bugs, mud, and near-misses with falling to one's death. We came across one hill village near a river where a woman was sitting on her porch with a loom weaving silk into these beautiful scarves. She explained (via Ka) that it takes her three days to make each scarf. I asked her how much she sold them for, she said 120 baht (less than $4). I now have four of them. Expect gifts.

We are now back in Chiang Mai for the night, happy to have a hot shower, air conditioning, and a spider-free bathroom. We leave tomorrow for Hong Kong, for the very last days of our time together. Stay tuned for some woefully inadequate efforts to summarize the last two months of our lives.