Not your average Sabbath

We’re usually able to go to church in a city that’s about an hour from here, but there’s a festival going on in town that made it impossible for us to find any transportation there. We made the best of it by taking a boat tour down the river that runs next to our house. We paid 400 baht a piece (12 dollars) for a four hour boat ride that turned out to be a seven hour boat ride.

We rode on long motorized fishing-looking boats down the river for about two hours though some amazing looking jungle scenery, tangled vines, corn fields, Buddhist temples, resorts, and villages. We saw kids swimming in the river every so often and waved to them, but I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about getting into the brown silty water myself. Our swimwear is still lost so I haven’t really had to come to a final conclusion yet. We’ll see! After riding for long enough that our bums started aching, someone yelled, “Elephants!!” and we saw them. A dozen huge elephants at a camp at the side of the river, just waiting to be ridden. We pulled up on shore, paid 300 baht total (10 USD) for half an hour, sat down on the little saddle thing with the elephant driver man in front of us, and we were off! Justin and I couldn’t help but laugh that it was our very first weekend in Thailand and we were already on an elephant! Our whole group was piled on eight elephants in a long line, just having the time of our lives. We thought maybe we’d just walk on a scenic path or something—but no, we practically forded the river on our elephant! We lumbered right down the bank, across to a little island, and down the river a ways. The water was pretty deep, and we liked how the elephants used their trunks as snorkels.

Yep, this is real life!

We left the river 15 minutes later, walked through a village, along a little paved highway with pedestrians and scooters, and then finally back to the elephant camp. We bought some bananas to feed them and bought little elephant figurine souvenir.




First weekend in Thailand? Not bad! We went up the river a ways to a random little restaurant where we ate THE BEST pad thai we’ve ever had to date. We’ve been talking about it ever since. Pad thai is a lot less oily and saucy here than it is at home, so we’re determined to find it’s equivalent somewhere.

Yum yum yum. Must learn to make this!

There were some hot springs that were closed, but we looked around and saw this awesome section of the hot springs where you can buy eggs to boil in the water there. Too bad we were already melting or it would have sounded more appealing. We made one last stop at a little village on the way back because our boat tour man thought we might want to see the lifestyle there. It was by far the poorest place I’ve ever been in. There was some livestock, an extremely fat pig, and I think a dog, but the families literally lived in bamboo huts. Everything was dirty, I don’t think they had running water, and the kids were shy so I doubt they’d seen foreigners very often. Everyone’s Thai language skills are pretty awful at this point, so we sort of muttered some hellos and took some pictures, but it was a short visit. We rode the boat for another two hours up the river and finally, the sight of the mountainside Buddhist temple told us we were home. At nights we usually eat next door at the landlady’s restaurant, and we’ve had some amazing dishes so far. We eat curry a lot…which is a good thing because we like it, but we also look forward to the non-curry meals, but that night we had a great red curry with some potatoes in it. We’re doing our best to figure out what we eat so we’ll be able to order ourselves and hopefully learn to cook something by the end, but it’s a lot to take in at once! Rice and noodles are a staple, which is great! Thai people eat with the fork in the left hand and the spoon in the right, using the fork to shovel food onto the spoon and the spoon to get the food into your mouth. Justin is happy because this is how Persian people eat, and I like it because it’s efficient! We should adopt it at home..haha. There actually ARE chopsticks here, but they are kind of a novelty thing and you don’t find them at every restaurant. Still though, go Asia. Our room has no air conditioning, so we have two floor fans that we have blowing right on us all night, and that makes it bearable. We don’t have screens on the windows or doors to keep the bugs out, so we can’t even get a fresh breeze going through at night! We do our best to air out the room with the lights off just before bed—we’ve already got the system down!