Three days of bugs and heat

Here's the equation:
2 Americans + 2 Brits + 2 Israelis + 1 Canadian x 3 days of hiking x sleeping in bamboo huts x swimming in waterfalls = completely insane adventure

I rode an elephant. I rode an elephant with John. Our elephant was the only one that had only tourists on it and no guide. For some reason everyone else had a guide. In place of a guide, we had a piece of string that looped over a pole on the ass of the elephant in front of us. We knew from the start that it was a sketchy set-up, but we said who cares. 20 minutes later we're heading up the side of this mountain type thing, twisting our way up the hill behind another elephant, and enjoying the sites. Until the string breaks. Which, as you can deduce, left the two of us sitting atop an elephant on an incredibly steep embankment, with my view consisting of the shrubs on the ground 30 feet below the edge of the ridge we're on. I'm literally on an elephant, with no guide, on a cliff, and the elephant is making a strange squealing noise. Needless to say, I was a bit scared for a few seconds, but the guide jumped off the elephant in front of us, blasted our elephant in the face with some sort of spiked club, and retied the string, exactly how it had been tied before. The rest of the ride was uneventful, and even slightly disapointing, but at least I rode an elephant with no guide!
The rest of our trek including some brutal hiking. It's a little bit dicouraging when your exhausted, but still plugging along, thinking you're doing alright, and the middle-aged man from the tribe you're staying with is running up the mountain with his 5 year old daughter on his shoulders basically telling you you're pathetic. This is after he had hand-plowed 400 acres of rice fields and built a house for his neighboring villager.
We hiked pretty deep into the woods/jungle, and very far up the mountain. We spent one night with a larger group of hill tribe people and another night at a village where there were only two families, and one didn't seem to be around. I played with a young boy named Lua-ai who sported a bright pink Umbro hat and an array of other day-glo colored attire. We dug a hole with his gardening tool, burried some leaves and sticks in it, and covered it all up. Then we played guns and he killed me approximately 500 times. My dying routine got better and better each time. At this village, you had to walk about ten minutes to take a shower, in a bucket, which wasn't really a shower, but moreso just dumping disease infested water on yourself and trying to pretend you were clean. Then you had to walk 10 minutes back up the mountain so you were ready for another shower.
All joking aside, the scenery was amazing. We walked along a river and wound our way up the mountain. We stopped at various water-falls and tried to cut vines to swing off the tops of them. Our guide was a guy named "Eddie", who seemed a tad bit crazy for most of the three days, but was friendly enough so that it didn't matter. He was always laughing at weird shit, and singing weird songs. He also picked wild mushrooms every step of the way, which we decided he ate for three days straight and could possibly have explained his strange behavior. He was obviously high as high can be.
I need to eat right now, as I'm starving, but I'll post again soon. The treking was a blast, despite a couple disapointing moments, and I met some really great people, two of which I'm having dinner with right now. More to come! I'm alive, I'm having fun, I miss Joan the most, it's not easy being away from her. (cue romantic music,
eric is a sap)