Friday morning we were up early and packed a change of clothes to take to the Elephant conservation.. its called the Elephant nature park and it was about an hour drive from our hotel. We arrived around 10 or 11 in the morning and had a brief introduction meeting with the rest of the group of volunteers for the day. It is an amazing organization started by a woman who grew up in a hill tribe village here. Her name is Lek, she has actually been featured by many news sources of the years for her work with elephants. The current camp has only been open about 6 years, but they went from having 4 elephants to 9 and now 30. Elephants have a long history of abuse in Thailand, which seems quite contradictory to the fact that they are also considered a sacred symbol of Thai people. Each elephant has a heartbreaking story... one called Jokia was blinded by her owner and Mahout (elephant trainer) because she refused to work after loosing her baby, she was working when she gave birth and her baby rolled down the hill and died...they flung rocks from a sling shot at her eyes, as well as jabbing them with sticks to try and make her work. She is doing well at the camp now though and has a friend, another elephant who stays close by her side.
It was so amazing to be a part of the elephants day.. we were able to feed them and then bath them in the river. It was really surreal to be standing right beside such a HUGE animal. I have whole new love for elephants, they are such amazing creatures.
The next morning, Saturday, we packed up and headed to the bus station for another lovely 4 hour bus ride. We arrived at our next destination, Tha Ton, in the afternoon just in time for lunch. The guesthouse we stayed at there was in a really pretty area right next to the river. We sat at tables outside under the trees with music playing in the background, it was really pretty and nice to have a minute to relax.. But we did only had a minute before Laura and I went with our guide, Champooh, to see the Wat Tha Ton, a temple with different structrues on 9 different levels. The other members of our group were tired from traveling and opted to stay at the hotel, but Laura and I don't want to waste a minute of our precious travel time :)
The temples were really a sight to see and there are huge buddha statues everywhere we go. One of the places we stopped had statues of all the different buddhas from the different regions, there are different buddhas, for example china uses the big "happy buddha" and then other places like Cambodia and Laos, and other asian countries, all have a different style of buddha. It was really interesting to see and Champooh is such a great guide and kept exlaining everything to us. There were many pictures of the Thai king and we learned how he has reigned the longest of any monarch in the world, over 60 years so far. He became the king at the age of 19 when his older brother, who was only 22, died. I have just loved learning about the Thai culture and being able to see how the people live.. The last few months before this trip were rough and I was feeling like i was just going through the motions, i am finally feeling like myself again.
Anyway, the rest of saturday was slow paced, Laura wasn't feeling well, we think she had some bad food or something, so we just hung out at the hotel and she tried to get some sleep. Luckily she was feeling much much better the next morning before we had another few hours to drive to get to Chaing Rai. Fortuneatley we also didn't have to ride the bus at all, instead we took a sawngtaew. We had two stops on the way to Chaing Rai, First the monkey temple. There was a huge mountain side that went strainght up and there were monkeys all over the place, there was also stairs that went up the side of the mountain to the top but Champooh didn't want anyone going up because it can be dangerous with all the monkey's. Instead we were able to buy some peanuts and feed the monkey;s that came down, and once there was food present there were quite a few that decided to show up... they were so cute! They would walk right up and take the food from our hands. There was one that you could tell didn't miss many meals, you would feed him and he would just hang out beside you and wait for more food! Laura was feeding him and she stood up to walk away and he reached out and grabbed onto her pants, more food more food! After i ran out of food i was just standing by myself staring up the mountain and the last monkey i had just fed all of a sudden screamed and ran straight at me... I thought he was going to eat me, but he just pushed my leg and ran away.. it was so funny. I think he was letting me know that i was no longer welcome if i was outta food!
After leaving the monkey temple we heading further north, to the "northermost point" in Thailand, right at the burma bourder (well, Myanmar actually). There was a huge market right there at the border and we had a few minutes to wander around before piling back into our sawngtaew and heading to the Golden Triangle for lunch. The golden triangle to the point where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet.. There was a cool viewpoint that overlooked where you could see all three countries.
Once arriving in Chaing Rai we had a few hours to relax and then went to dinner and hit the night market.. night markets are fairly common, Champooh told us that many people work elsewhere and then come to the night market for a second job (when do they sleep?!) The market was huge and there was so much to see... There were even two differnet stages with live music, lipsyncing and dancing by "ladyboys"... men dressed as women. It was.. interesting! Many of them were pretty convincing and you could hardly tell if they were men or women.
Today is a free day and Laura and I were able to wander the morning market, almost loosing our breakfast after walking throuhg the food market where there is raw meat and fish, the smells were overwhelming. Then we wandered looking for the internet place out guide told us about only to find it closed.. although it was nice to walk around and just take everything in. However, i am out of time, so i'll update again soon. Tomorrow we head back to Chaing Mai and then take an overnight train to Bangkok for a few days before heading down south where the white sand beaches and tourquoise blue water awaits... :)
1 comment:
Yay! You fixed it!
Post a Comment