The endings

This is a long post.  I warn you.  At first I thought I should cut it down, but... this is the closest thing I have to a journal and I wanted to document some of this stuff.  Plus, I love these stories!  And if it's more info than you want... you don't have to read it.  :)  *She says, as she laughs gaily, knowing her biggest fans would never DREAM of leaving one of her posts unread.*

As you may have surmised from my last post, I am indeed back in Utah.  THAT, however, is not really what I want to post about.  :)  Basically I just want to fill you in on my last two weeks in Thailand.

Okay... do you people like monkeys?  Because guess what?  I heart them.  There is a city in Thailand called Lop Buri, and it is FULL of monkeys!  The monkeys and the people all just sort of live with together.  In this picture you can see how there are monkeys climbing all around, and the people just sort of leave them alone.

There is one main park where monkeys like to hang out.  In this park there are ruins of an old temple, and the monkeys run, and jump, and climb ALL OVER them.  They are so funny and so smart, though.  The also sit and wait by the road for the traffic to back up.  When the traffic stops, they jump into the backs of all the pickup trucks and steal whatever is in them.  It's great to watch.  They also cross the road and climb all over the buildings and things.  Really, the people just ignore them!  It's amazing.

We bought little bags of sunflower seeds to give to the monkeys.  Sometimes they scare me, though!  They KNOW you have food, and basically think it's their right to have it... so... they do what they need to do to get it!  They'll jump all over you, and try to pry your fingers open with their little hands.  They ARE wild animals, though, so they'll bite, too, which really isn't as cute.  :)  It's not so bad when they don't break skin... but who  knows what diseases they have, so all in all... probably just best not to get bit.  :)

Our last trip in Thailand was to the south.  We went to Krabi and Phuket.  Krabi is a coastal city, and Phuket is a little island just off the west coast.  Krabi was our first stop.  It was SO beautiful.  It's amazing that places like it even EXIST!  Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten the pictures off of Whitney's camera, so you'll have to put up with just mine.  I might post more pics when I get them.  The first day we got there, we just drove around to see the scenery, and found a hotel, and just sort of relaxed.  The next day was not NEARLY as relaxing.  Dad, Amber, and Brian decided they wanted to go Scuba Diving.  The rest of us aren't certified to dive, so we passed on that.  :)  Mom decided that she wanted a relaxing/shopping/foot massage kind of a day, and Whitney and I wanted to go kayaking.  So... we all did just that.

Kayaking was SO amazing!  It was a TON of work, though.  (I guess technically they weren't real kayaks.  More like... a cross between a kayak and a canoe.  Moving on.)  Our kayaking group consisted of one Australian kid named  Ross... or Russ... couldn't ever quite figure it out, one German couple named Sven and Yvonne (Of course they were named Sven and Yvonne.  Just... of course.  LOVE it.), our guide, David, and us.  To start off, we all got into our kayaks and headed down river.  It was so nice.  Whit and I were wanting to get some serious rowing in, but our guide kept telling us to slow down and let the river do most of the work.  We tried.  It was hard.  We took some winding little river paths around, and saw AMAZING scenery.  One of the coolest things was that we got to go through caves.  Ooooooooo.  :)  We paddled up to these little caves and the entrances were so short!  I was a little scared, cause I'm claustrophobic and I was worried I would freak out, but it ended up being okay.

We paddled into the opening of the first cave, and it immediately got pretty dark.  You could barely see the outlines of the path.  It was so cool.  It was filled with all of these stalactites and stalagmites, and we had to negotiate the kayak around the bigger and longer ones.

It all looked sort of like a movie set, just because I've never seen caves like that in real life.  They were so beautiful!  After we got out of the other side of the cave, we ended up in a gorgeous little lagoon.  We were completely surrounded by walls of green jungle-life.

I can't even tell you how pretty it was.  We stayed there for a little while, then headed out, back through the cave.  After a little while, we got to another cave.  It was dark when we got inside, but after only a few more seconds, it was PITCH black.  And lucky for Whit and me, we were the last kayak, so we lost the guides flashlight pretty darn quickly.  We couldn't see a thing!!

 We kind of freaked out for a minute because we couldn't figure out where we were going.  The paths were so skinny that we couldn't really even get our paddles into the water without hitting the walls and stalactites/stalagmites, and we couldn't see anything, so we couldn't figure out how to move, or even were to go.  It was freaky.  We figured out that I could take a picture, and it would give us a second of light.  Finally we made our way out.  After that we saw another cave, and another couple of lagoons.  Everything was amazing.  We also went through this little maze of trees.  I don't know what kind they were, but these plants completely surrounded us and all we had was a little pathway through them.  They were like tunnels we went through because the plants were like walls on the side and they covered us above like a ceiling.  There were a few winding paths, and they were super hard to get through, and at one point we kind of lost our group.

We finally got to another cave that we got out of our kayaks to explore.  It was awesome.  The entire floor was made up of fossils and seashells because years and years and years before, the water had been super high.  Our guide then pointed out to us several hieroglyphics that had been painted THREE-THOUSAND YEARS AGO!  Freak.

The amazing thing is that they let us in that cave, and let us see the hieroglyphics, and let us touch the stalactites/stalagmites and everything.  In America you'd be taken to the entrance of the cave and then shown pictures of what was inside.  After we got back in the kayaks, we headed back to the starting point.  Problem?  UPSTREAM.  Whit and I paddled for all we were worth.  I'm not kidding.  We didn't stop paddling once, but we were barely moving!  The other two kayaks were steadily pulling away from us, and eventually- we couldn't see them at all.  After a LONG time of rowing as hard as we could, we finally realized we had no idea if they had stayed on the main river or if they had taken another path.  We didn't see them for forever.  We thought we might be in a wee bit of trouble, but our only option was to keep on going.  Finally we rounded a corner and saw the place to dock the kayaks in the far, far distance.  When I say that our arms were giving out... I mean- OUR ARMS WERE GIVING OUT.  It hurt sooooo bad!!  The other two kayaks got back probably more than TWENTY MINUTES before we did.  We were dying.  And they just sat and watched us coming.  Slowly.  Coming.  Slowly.  When we finally pulled up they, of course, made fun of us a bit, and then said that it wasn't a good idea to have a kayak without a man in it.  Yeah... well, cool.  Anyway, it was still a blast and I freakin' loved it.

The next day we went on a little... snorkeling expedition.  It was so beautiful!  We got on a speed boat and headed out into the open sea.  Yo Ho.  Our first stop was "The Beach."

 Evidently there is a movie called "The Beach."  Don't know much about it, except for the fact that it was filmed in one of the most beautiful places ever.  Oh, and Leonardo DiCaprio was in it.  Those are the facts.  We went to a couple of amazing snorkeling spots after that.

I seriously love snorkeling.  There were tons of bright, tropical fish swimming all over the place!  At lunch they brought Brian a special plate of spaghetti noodles without nut oil (he has a fatal allergy to nuts, FYI), but they brought him TONS!  We felt bad wasting them, so we stuck handfuls of extra spaghetti noodles into my bag.  :)  On our next stop, however, we made an A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. discovery.  SPAGHETTI NOODLES ARE THE BEST SNORKELING FOOD, EVER!  We put the noodles in the pockets of our swimming shorts, and fed them to the fish.  We would hold out a noodle, and DOZENS of fish would come fight for it.  It was a blast.  Sometimes the fish couldn't figure out which was food, though- the noodle or your hand.  Brian got bit pretty hard.  Ha.  :)

So basically, this speed boat took us around to different beaches and snorkeling spots and such.  It was such a fun day!  Really tiring, though.  That sun can definitely wear you out!  I need to get myself an ocean.

After all the fun in Krabi, we headed to Phuket.  My parents had a senior missionary conference down there.  On Sunday we went to Phuket's cute little branch.  Well... actually they don't have a branch.  They have a "group".  They meet in a hotel.  There are like 5 members.  It's awesome.  The rest of the time we just sort of hung out and swam at the beach and played with the monkeys at the beach and such.  One day we decided to go to this snorkeling beach we had heard about.  There didn't seem to be any good snorkeling, but when we looked to the left (where the beach looked like it ended) there were tons of huge rocks, and we thought if we could climb over them- we might find good snorkeling.  Oh. My. Word.  It took FOREVER to climb around these giant boulders... and they just kept going!!  It was way hot, and we basically just baked out in the sun while we climbed.  Finally we got to a tiny beach that was like... 15 feet long or so.  It was way cute, but again- not any good snorkeling spots.  There was this cute little Thai girl there (she was like 10) who became immediately attached to Whitney.  Her name was Bio.  They hung out for a while (she didn't speak any English) but they had tons of fun anyway and she tried to teach Whit Thai words.  She was cute.  Whit (through charades) told Bio we were going to go snorkeling, so she ran and found her mom and asked if she could come with us.  Oh.  Okay.  So, she gestured for us to follow her, and showed us a tiny pathway that connected the beach we were on to the beach we had come from.  That's right.  It was like a 20 foot path that basically just cut off the corner with all the rocks- yeah, the ones that took us 45 minutes to hike around!  It was funny.  Bio showed us where to snorkel, but it turned out that she was afraid of deep water, which is super odd for Thai kids!  We swam out a little ways, and then Bio got nervous, so she climbed onto Whitney's back.  The problem with that?  She made Whitney sink, so Whit couldn't use her snorkel cause she was too deep!  Whit found a rock to stand on, but we really couldn't communicate the problem to Bio.  She just sort of stood there smiling, and we had no idea how to get her back to shore without drowning Whit.  Hmmm.  It took a while, but we finally managed to drag/swim/putter our way back to the shore.  :)

One night we were eating dinner at a cute little sort-of-outdoor restaurant when this CRAZY storm hit.  That is one thing I'm really going to miss about Thailand.  The rain storms are so... just incredible.  And I love the rain- so dang much.  It was an unbelievable rainstorm and the thunder/lightening were unbelievable!  It was seriously deafening and just kept going and going and going.  We ran out into the road and just jumped around in the rain.  We were soaked, but it was so warm and beautiful!  That lasted until lightening flashed ridiculously close.  :)  We went back into the restaurant and waited there for a little while, but finally decided just to go for it, and we headed back to the hotel- yes, walking.  Even though the rain was still really heavy, the lightening seemed to have moved on, so we decided that probably meant we needed to go swimming in the ocean in the rain in the dark!  By now it was pretty late, so it was way dark.  We ran out into the ocean, and the water- was SO WARM!  Like, it was way warmer than the air.  It was so dang fun.  I thought Whit was going to pass out though, she was so nervous that we were going to be killed by lightening.  :)  It was great.  I really loved Phuket.

A few nights before we flew home, we had dinner with a member of the Royal Family.  Crazy, eh?  I think she is the previous King's granddaughter.  Anyway, she and her son came over for dinner.  It was interesting to watch her.  Everything, down to the way she carried herself just seemed very regal.  Her son is mentally handicapped, and one of his favorite things to do is to sing.  After dinner, we all gathered around the piano and sang a few songs.  It was pretty cool.

I guess that about wraps up Thailand.  Well... there is no way to really explain the experiences I had over there, but it wraps up some of the fun stories, anyway.  It is such an amazing country.  Anyway... time to be American again, I guess.  :)

:(

Dear Utah,

Please stop being so cold.

Best regards,

Michelle

Chiang Mai

So... Chiang Mai.  Basically, it freakin' rocked.  Chiang Mai is in northern Thailand and Whitney, Brian and I decided that we would take the train to save money.  Let's talk about the train ride.  First off, it was 13 hours long.  Big deal?  Probably not since we made sure to pay extra for the air conditioned car.  We accidentally got to the train station in Bangkok an hour early.  This wouldn't have really mattered except for the fact that everything was outdoors and the only place they had to sit was in the sun.  H.O.T.  No, really.  Next... the train was delayed for two hours.  That makes 3 hours sitting in the hot sun.  We were baking.  And sweating.  And did I mention that we were hot... ?  We finally got on the train... only to find out that the air conditioning was broken.  Neat.  The GOOD news is that they had fans to cool it down a little.  The BAD news is that three rows of people weren't covered by the fans.  You can probably make an educated guess as to where we were sitting.  THIRTEEN HOURS OF BAKING, BAKING, BAKING.   In a train.  Aaaaaaaalllllll the way.  :)  Oh, and also Brian's tray table didn't work.  Oh, and also Brian sat next to a crazy old Asian woman who put her hand on his leg and patted the inside of his thigh for a while.  HA!!!  Oh, and also the train hit someone.  Ahem.  Let me repeat that.  THE TRAIN HIT SOMEONE.  AS IN, THE TRAIN RAN INTO A CAR.  AS IN... I HAVE OFFICIALLY BEEN IN A TRAIN ACCIDENT.  We just felt a little bit of a jolt and heard a scrapping noise.  Then the train slowed to a stop and we sat there for like 30 minutes.  We didn't really know what was going on until the police cars and ambulances started showing up.  After that, we got going again and FINALLY made it to Chiang Mai.  Sorry for anyone in a hurry because yes... all that story was only leading up to Chiang Mai.  If you are bored I give you permission to quit now.  Only... you'll regret it.

:)

The first day there we went to tour a bunch of factories.  Places where they make paper umbrellas, silk, wood lacquer stuff... ya know.  Factories.  It was actually quite fun.  I really

liked it.  I won't go into detail, though, cause it'll probably sound really dull in print.  It was fun, though.  Take my word for it.  COME ON PEOPLE, I'M JUST ASKING FOR A LITTLE FAITH.  After the factories we went to a place called Doi Sutheeb. (Or maybe Doi Suthep.  People spell it different ways and I don't know which is right.  I tried.  Kind of.)  Basically it's a really cool Wat (temple) on top of a giant hill.  There are 300 steps to get up to the top and somehow... it felt like about DOUBLE that.  :)  It had all sorts of cool bells and statues and things.  It also supposedly has one of the prettiest views of Chiang Mai (which is a GORGEOUS part of Thailand, anyway).  Here is the view:

Yyyyyyyyeah.  Can everyone say pollution??  Dang.  That must've been one pretty view.

The next day we went on a fun elephant trek.  We got to ride an elephant for a few hours around a beautiful jungle area.  Unfortunately, only two people can ride on one elephant, so Brian took one for the team and rode his own.  He's a good type of human.  One of the elephants we were riding near had a little baby, and he was so cute!  He just followed his mom the whole time.  They didn't have to put a rope on him or anything... he'd just follow.  He spent most of the time spraying dirt all over himself.  After we got off of the elephants, one of the trainers let Whitney sit on an elephants back without any of the seats or anything.

Then, he started leading the elephant away and we had no idea where they were going!  He led the elephant into the river and all the elephants sprayed water into the air.  It was awesome.  We then watched a really cool elephant show.  Those are really smart animals, by the way.  

We then got to ride a bamboo raft down a river for a couple of hours.  The scenery was so

pretty!  We all got to take turns steering, too.  (Kind of.  The guides only let us take over when there were no rocks or anything coming up.)  

Next up was the snake show.  Holy cow... safety precautions in Thailand are very different than safety precautions in America.  They would let the snakes come up into the audience and strike at people!  One actually even bit the bag Whitney was wearing!!  Yeah... the snake trainers weren't expecting that.  She. Could. Be. Dead.  One got away from the trainers and fled.  It was awesome watching them freak out and chase it down.  :)

Our next stop of the day was probably the most exciting.  It was called the Butterfly and Orchid farm.  You can see how thrilling a stop like that could be.  I'm telling you... there were at least a dozen butterflies.  Yeah.  Major bust.  Lame.

We then went to visit the Hill Tribes.  There are a few different tribes and they each have their own traditions.  One of the tribes all stretch out their earlobes, and one you've more likely heard of, the women all put rings around their necks and stretch them out.  My favorite part of the tribes were two little boys that were riding their tricycles down this huge hill.  They were FLYING they were going so fast and they were absolutely loving it.  It was adorable.  We watched them for quite a while.  They were so dang cute.

The next day was more low key.  My parents were holding zone conference that day in Chiang Mai, so we went and sang a song for it.  Afterward we went to a Muay Thai match.  It's also called Thai Boxing.  It was way cool to see, but I don't know if I'd go to another one.  It's basically boxing with no rules.  They hit and kick and knee... and anything they can.  Some of them ended up with good amounts of blood running down their faces.  I will never understand fighting sports.

We did have one super cool day the last day we were there, though.  We did a tour thing called Flight of the Gibbons.  (I found out that a gibbon is a monkey, by the way.)  After her school got out on Friday, Amber flew to Chiang Mai to do it with us.  Basically it was a tree-top tour of the jungle.  We got hooked into all of these harnesses and basically got to zip-line around the trees.  It was so dang amazing!  Freaky, though.  We were so high!  The sad part is that the pictures don't look high up.  I'm not sure why, but they don't.  Just to give you an idea, at the highest point we were 300 meters up from the ground!  (A meter is roughly a yard... and a yard is about 3 feet... and a foot is 12 inches... and an inch is... centimeters long.)  WE WERE DANG HIGH!  300 meters!  It was a crazy rush.  They gave us pieces of bamboo in the shape of a V that we could use as breaks when we got going too fast.  They told us which zip lines to use it on, because we'd get going too fast to stop on some lines!  One time I couldn't get the break attached fast enough and I kinda plowed the guides over... oops.  :)  Our guides were so dang funny.  They were having a blast scaring us over and over.  The zip lines lasted for about 3 hours.  There were gibbons in the forest that were yelling most of the time, too.  They have a way cute sound.  It was one of my favorite things we did here.  It was crazy fun.  Afterward they gave us lunch and then took us to a way pretty waterfall.

That night we headed back to Bangkok on... you guessed it... the train.  We had high hopes that the ride back would be better than the ride there.  Again we got to the train station about an hour early, and again- the train was about 2 hours late.  Cool.  At least we weren't waiting in the sun this time.  When the train finally pulled up, we ran to get in line to board, and we were in the front of the line (so we could keep our luggage close to us in the luggage racks).  Everyone on board the train was getting off and they were cleaning the train and preparing it for the trip back... all of this took a while.  Like maybe 30 minutes.  Finally everything seemed about ready when... the train pulled away.  Sorry, what??  Yeah- the train left.  Three and a half hours at the station and the train leaves?!  Supposedly it was coming right back, so we didn't want to go sit back down... first in line, remember?  We waited, and we waited, and waited... ONE HOUR later... the dang train finally comes back!  Good heavens.  I still have no idea where it went.  We finally got on board and got into our seats.  The good news was that the air conditioning worked.  The bad news... THE AIR CONDITIONING WORKED.  It was a night train, so the temperature outside wasn't all that hot to start with, and the air was CRANKED.  I have never been so cold before.  I'm not kidding you.  They gave us blankets, but these blankets were actually just huge towels.  Strange.  I had to get my suitcase out to find ANY WARM CLOTHES that I could.  I already had jeans and a tee-shirt on.  I was lucky enough to find two pairs of socks, and a jacket.  Unfortunately... even with the blanket that wasn't enough.  I also pulled my skirt out of my suitcase and put it on over my jeans.  I had no other warm clothes and I was still FREEZING.  Everyone on the train had their blankets wrapped around them and pulled over their heads like hoods.  We were so so freezing.  I'm not sure I can even do justice to this cold.  Oh... and Brian's tray table didn't work.  Ha.

One great post... minus cute pictures.

Ahhh!  I'm way behind!  Okay- this post is going to be a little less in-depth because I just want to try to catch up a bit.  K?  Cool.  If you want to see more pictures, I'll put them in an album on my facebook profile.  (Cause I'm sure you're all just clamoring for more, right??)  :)

First off- The Crocodile Farm.  It was such a blast!!  We saw... well, crocodiles.  Sure.  Lots of them, actually!  Crazy animals.  Whit and I actually pet one, too!  More like touched it, actually... touched it and then got the heck out of there.  :)  

We also got to "fish" for crocodiles.  How does one do that?  Simple.  You just put a dead chicken on some fishing wire... and throw it to a bunch of hungry crocodiles!  Check out the picture my brother got- see the one jumping in the air?  Pretty dang awesome.

Our absolute favorite part of the crocodile farm, though, was the tigers.  Yes... at the crocodile farm.  No questions please.  I have them, too.  :)  They had baby tigers, and first we payed a few dollars so we could hold them and feed them a bottle of milk.  Then for some reason, they let us sit and play with the cubs for like 20 minutes!  They were dang cute.  That's all.  It was awesome.

I also have to give a shout out to my sister, Amber. While I've been here, I've gotten to see her in two of her school plays.  It's been awesome.  She rocks.  Hollaaaa!

Whitney had an amazing idea that we should all go to an orphanage and volunteer for a while.  Let me just tell you.  It was incredible.  Those kids were so, so sweet.  I seriously just wanted to take them all home with me.  There is no way to really put it into words.  (Well... I'm sure my sister Lindsay could, but... I'll just have to leave it at... "wow".)  It was just great.  I wish so much that I could have communicated with them better!  The fact that we didn't speak Thai sure didn't keep them from TRYING to talk to us though!

 You are just going to have to believe me when I say that these pictures are dang cute.  I don't know why I can only post one... but blogger hates me.  That is all I know for sure.  The end.  Maybe I'll try to get more of them up later.

We just barely got back from a vacation to Chiang Mai.  Now THAT is what I call fun.  I'll post about that as soon as I'm no longer angry at blogger for taking so many hours to load my dang pictures!!!

A few more days to blog about. :)

Sorry that I keep grouping a bunch of stuff into each post!  I'd love to say that I'll get better at spreading them out, but that might be a lie.  Okay.  So, we finally made it to the floating market.  Such a cool place!  You... float in a boat as you shop.  That's really all there is to it.  One of the best parts was watching the people on the side taking pictures of US.  (Thais get really excited when they see white people.  They realllllllly do.)  On the way home from the floating market we drove through a whole bunch of coconut groves.  ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL.  One of the most amazing things I've seen.  There were rows and rows of coconut trees with trenches of water between each row.  The water, though was covered with... I don't know what it was.  Moss of some sort.  They were all LIME GREEN.  The colors were SO vibrant and so so cool.  It was probably my favorite part of that day.

 Adventure number next:  Dreamword.  Bangkok's very own theme park!  Let me tell you a little bit about it.  Dreamworld is Disneyland's worst nightmare.  *Disclaimer.  I didn't actually ask Disneyland about this.*  I pretty much think that the only reason Disney even HAS copyright laws is to avoid this very scene.  :)  You see, Thailand doesn't think much of copyright laws.  Actually, I'm pretty sure nobody in the country knows they even exist!  No, really.  Stop doubting me... I'm serious.  Dreamworld was a riot!  It was 85% a broken down Disneyland and 15%... what WAS that?  I loved it!!  Here are some pics for your enjoyment.

This last week we went to a city called Hua Hin.  Its an awesome, awesome coastal city.  We're talking BEACH, people!  Amber didn't come because she had a school

field trip... to Japan.  Sure.  Why not go to Japan for a field trip?  This week she has a field trip to Singapore for a theatre convention.  Okay... back to the subject.  For those of you who somehow don't already know, the beach is my favorite place ever.  I loooove it.  These particular bunch of beaches were amazing.  When the tide would go out, we got to see the COOLEST sea life and sea shells.  We wandered the coast for HOURS  and HOURS.  The one downside?  That same sea life was also IN the water... and not just on the shore.  I have had my fair share of jellyfish stings.  These have been from both Thailand and Hawaii.  Many, many in fact.  Okay, all of them have been from "members of the jellyfish family" and not actual jellyfish, but... same thing.  They both have insane amounts of zapping power.  *Moving on.*  The ocean in Hua Hin was FULL of jellyfish.  Meaning?  No swimming.  Dang.  We did get brave enough to wade out to a couple of sandbars, though.  The jellyfish were SO COOL to watch!  They may be some of my favorite animals.  Someday I'll have a pet jellyfish.  *That may or may not have been a true statement.*  Anyway.  These beaches were so cool to wander because of all the sea life we got to watch.  Jellyfish, territorial crabs, eels, shrimp, squid, fish, etc...  We also got to chill on a dock when a shrimp fishing boat came in.  They had been out to sea for 10 days and it was AMAZING to watch these guys unloading their boats and all of the shrimp and fish they caught.  I think they thought it was a little strange that we were just standing there watching them, but... I sure didn't care.  :)  Long live coastal cities, man.  Long may they live.