Update from Amanda

 

Hello my lovely friends and family! Suwadee Kah!
I have so much to tell about, so prepare to read for a while! I'll start with Bali first...

After staying in Ubud for two nights, where I watched fascinating ethnic Balinese dances and visited "Elephant Cave" and the Monkey Forest Sanctuary, I was picked up by a very friendly driver named Wayan. He took me to Munduk, where Nyoman lives and where I would (I thought) work on school gardens. We taught each other English and Balinese along the drive, and he took me for lunch and drove the long way to see some beautiful rice paddies and other farms. When we got to Munduk it started to rain, and not a warm tropical rain, but a very cold heavy rain that you only experience in high elevations in Bali. The rest of my stay there I wore jeans and a flannel it was so cold! After a little rest, they took me to see the house where I would stay in a village called Sanda. Along the way we stopped at the office to meet Eloh, Nyoman's daughter. These names are very common in Bali; Nyoman means third born, while Eloh and Wayan mean first born. Eloh stayed with me at the house in Sanda, which I now call my garden house because it was completely covered in vines and cacao and vanilla and surrounded by rice paddies. It really was a beautiful sanctuary for me. I didn't start teaching until after the weekend, once Kuningan - the holiday celebrating Hinduism in Bali - had passed. I worked for two hours in the morning with a kindergarten class, mainly teaching English nursery rhymes and songs (we weeded the small garden on the last day of my stay there), and also taught a 4th grade and a 6th grade class for one hour. The kindergarteners were so cute and so fun to be around. They know no english but can understand my meaning just by expressions and pictures and games. One day after class, Nyoman took me to see the huge Banyan tree up the road from my garden house. It was over 600 years old, and you could climb in and out of it through the massive hanging roots! On the last day of my stay, Eloh took me to a waterfall which was huge and so powerful. That night I stayed at Nyoman's house and helped them cook a delicious feast of rice, noodles, chicken, fried vegetables, corn paddies, and so much other food that I could never explain in text! The next morning Wayan took me back to Kuta to the airport, where I set off for Thailand. I landed in Bangkok and went straight to the train station to catch the night train up to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, where I would meet three of my friends from UCSC...

After a long 15 hour train ride and not really sleeping on chairs in a overly air-conditioned train, I found where my friends were staying, and finally got to enjoy Thailand. The food here is amazing and soooooo cheap! Everyone you meet here is smiling and everyone says hello where ever you go! I have to say its the perfect place to be travelling on my own, and in fact I would have it no other way. I spent Halloween in Chiang Mai, which was pretty uneventful as Thais don't normally celebrate it. The next night however was the start of Loi Krathong, where everyone sends off paper lanterns and sends "krathongs" - a boat made of banana leaf with candles, incense, food, flowers, maybe coins - down the river. You are meant to release something with the lantern and send away your bad luck and sins with the krathong (you can also make a wish on the krathong). The festival lasted two nights, and both nights there were parades through town, fireworks blown off at random by small children, tons of street food and street markets and way too many tourists! I also went to the Saturday and Sunday markets. They are held at night and are huge! Bags, shoes, jewelry, scarfs, candles, wooden figurines, postcards, and an abundance of cheap street food is what the girls and I were herded through by all the crowds of people. Everything was so cheap - 10 baht for pad thai, 5 baht for 2 spring rolls, 13 baht for an ice cream. (The currency is 33 baht to 1 USD!)

After revelling in the madness of the holiday in Chiang Mai, I set off for a town called Pai with my 3 girlfriends and 4 boys they had met in the south - 2 Danishmen and 2 Englishmen. I planned to spend a week or less there, and I ended up staying for almost 10 days! Pai is a really sweet little hippie town consisting of about 3 main streets, tons of artists and live music over several bars every night. The boys rented motor bikes, and us girls hopped on the back and cruised around the north, stopping for a waterfall here, a nice look out over rice paddies there. Scooter gang!!! The girls and I went on a 2 day, 1 night trek around the north of Pai, starting on the day before my birthday. The first day we hiked up a massive hill and stopped at a waterfall for lunch, then continued to a Lahu Hilltribe village where we ate dinner and slept. I was awakened by a full chorus of every rooster from every corner of town at about 4AM, and the ballad of the farm did not stop from then on. But I have to say I would want no other way to spend my birthday then to wake up in a village of such kind, gentle people in the middle of a bamboo forest in Thailand. The rest of the trek was a bit tiresome as we had to hike along a river and ended up crossing this river about 20 times. Oh and there were leaches in the river - yay. Luckily no blood-suckers found my skin, only my sock and boots!
A day later the girls left and I stayed in some nice bungalows by myself and ended up meeting a crew of amazing Isreali people that had taken over the rest of the hostel! Pai also had a really nice pool to lounge by, which was extremely convenient as it was extremely hot my last few days in Pai. I also tried to go on an elephant ride. It was something I've wanted to do even before leaving for Thailand so I was really looking forward to it. I went with a really nice girl from Hawaii named Chelleigh and both of us were amped to finally get to be with the elephants. What we didn't know was that the elephant camps were actually enslavement camps. The elephants were chained maybe 5 feet from a post, not free to graze on banana trees as they would have liked. We rode a 45 yr old female elephant (elephants live to be about 80, so this one was getting old). You could tell she had given rides her whole life and was tired. She would walk really slow, and sitting on her back I could feel her bones shift with each huge step. Every once and a while she would stop and the guide sitting at her neck would hack at her with this horrible tool that looked like a small grim reeper cane. The top was metal, and was not sharp to the touch, but could definitely leave a mark, and it was then that we noticed the scars on her forhead. The tour was meant to last for an hour, but neither Chelleigh nor I could bare to see her hit like that for more than 5 minutes. Our guide didn't understand when we said we wanted to go back, but eventually steered her around, pushing with his feet on her ears.When we got back to the camp they let us feed the elephants. I made a point to give them as much banana tree as I could carry, while Chelleigh argued with the owner of the camp that hitting the elephants hurt them. "Oh it doesn't hurt them" they say, "they have thick skin." But Chelleigh had a good point, "then why would they react to you hitting them if it didn't hurt?" The man who organized the tour was shocked, not at how they are treated, but at our disliking of it. He was very apologetic and refunded us half of our money, and later bought us a drink at the bar.

After realizing I'd spent over a week in one place, and had less than two months to see so much more, I headed back south for a night in Chiang Mai, then went up north the other way to Chiang Rai. The fiance of a man I used to go sailing with lives there, Nattaya, and she was very helpful and showed me some wonderful parts of Chiang Rai. The night I arrived we went to the night market and went through a bit of the Saturday ngiht market. I bought a kilo of mandarins for 15 baht! The next day we went to the White Temple, done by the most famous artist in Thailand who lives in Chiang Rai, but whose name I forget (its a long one). This was unlike any other temple I have seen. Most have very traditional images of buddha or buddhist art around it. His temple included traditional art, but also had a really modern, clever touch to it. The whole thing was painted white and embroidered with tiny glass mirrors. White flowers were planted around it, and white fish swam in a pond around it too. The entrance had hands and skulls (painted white of course) coming up from the ground like from the depths of Hell. Once inside the temple, you are confronted with a thought-provoking mural. At the entrance is an image of a giant (like the one at the entrance to Goa Gajah - see pics!) and coming out of his mouth is "civilazation." Right near him are Western images - Batman, Spiderman and Superman all watched over the wretchedness of western civilization - prostitution, Pepsi, the twin towers burning, gasoline being pumped into ancient dragons' mouths, converse sneakers, profanity, police...you get the picture. Floating away from that were images of really happy families in lotus petals, all with their hands in prayer. They seemed pulled by their happiness to the back of the temple, where a monk sat still in meditation. A contrast, perhaps, of east and west...
Yesterday I went on a long-tailed boat ride with a couple of Canadians that I'd met in Pai, and bumped into randomly on the bus comin to Chiang Rai from Ch Mai. We took about an hour journey throught the river to a hot spring, which unfortunately was closed for cleaning, then went to a hilltribe village where they had a massive boa constrictor. It was 100 baht to take a picture using your camera holding the snake, and the three of us went in on it. She weighed 40 kilos and was 10 years old, just at her prime. At first she lay limp in our hands (I held the back end!) then after a while she started to move a bit. I was amazed at how strong she was - she could easily kill something much larger than me! Then I saw pictures of her on the walls, stretched out for 8 hands to hold. Looking at her cage, which wasn't half the length of her full body, I felt so sorry for her. She was captured from the forest, and now was making money for her owners off of awe-struck tourists. I find it hard to support such abuse, and stayed for a while to watch her, to see what she feels. You could tell she wanted out, that she didn't know why she'd been captured or why people had to hold her all the time. She drew her head near me and sniffed the air with her tongue. I bent down to see her face and she hissed ever so softly. I just imagined her praying that I would unlock the cage and set her free, and I wished that I could...
I am back in Chiang Mai now for the afternoon, catching a bus tonight to head down near Bangkok to the ancient capital of Ayuttaya. After a day there, I'll catch another night bus to go south to the province of Krabi - watch out beaches, here I come!