Khao Yai.

This past weekend we headed out on a camping trip to Khao Yai National Park. There were 18 “pharang” teachers and 2 guides. We arrived in khao Yai on Friday at about 7:00 after a 2-hour bus ride, and settled into bobby’s guesthouse, which would be our launching point for the weekend. We had a nice big hot meal, and settled in for a 6am wakeup call. On Saturday, we all climbed in the sogthaew truck, put on our leach socks, and started the journey to the campsite. When we got there, Chip, our guide, quickly put us to work, setting up tents and unpacking the trucks. Some wild deer wandered through the middle of the campsite fearlessly as we covered the tents with tarps because, according to Chip, they “weren’t waterproof.” We headed out to our first destination, which was a 1km hike past the waterfall made famous by the movie “the Beach” and towards a more private waterfall where we could go swimming. The water was very cold, but refreshing, and there was a small space behind the waterfall where you could sit, or even climb as the water ran down your back. We then headed towards the infamous bat cave, which is about 30 minutes outside the park, sitting in the middle of some cornfields. Chip pointed to the sky and told us in about 15 minutes they would come out and feed. 15 minutes later, a swarm of bats exploded out of the mouth of the cave and flew in a constant stream above our heads. It was mesmerizing to see this river of bats flying out of a mountain and off into the distance disappearing over the horizon line, all the while sending out high pitched squeaks, and forming patterns in the sky. This flood of bats lasted over an hour, and we were told that there are an estimated 3 million bats, and that the cave in over 1 mile deep. Chip said that the last time he ventured into the cave he found himself waist deep in bat guano.
We then headed back towards the campsite, where we spotted a wild elephant many different monkeys and a black bear. We retired for the night, after eating some delicious sweet and sour chicken and barbequed corn. The next day we packed up camp, as monkeys and deer played all around us, and headed to the highest point in Khao Yai. We hiked to various viewpoints, one that featured a 200m vertical drop, and then walked to a small-secluded waterfall. After that the sky opened up and we headed back to bobby’s to catch a bus home.

Ants Nest in a Tree
"What do you think your looking at?"
Chip, Liz and Monkeys
Endless Wave of Bats

More Bats

Thai Jungle
Liz and Lucas
Chip and Waterfall

Some of the Phuket Crew, (Alex, Heather, Kat, Julia, Mia, Felix, Brienne, Lucas, Anna, Guy Andrew, Rich, Patrick.)

Ja Poa Festival

Last Tuesday there was a big festival for the founder of Chaiyaphum, Ja Poa Phayalae. We woke up before 5am to make it to the center of town, where the Ja Poa statue is. When we got there we didn’t really know what was going on so joined in with everyone who was walking around the statue (we found out later we were supposed to walk around the statue three times and make a wish). As we walked around we stopped and watched the many elephants dressed in Thai silk dancing to the music. They came up to us and would put their trunks around our arms and one baby was sucking on my foot. Later in the day we went to an elephant performance with about 20 elephants. When we arrived the biggest of the elephants were sitting cross-legged on the field. We watched while people volunteered to lie down on the field while the elephants would pretend to stomp on the people three times, a couple times they actually touched the person, good thing it was a baby elephant. We saw an elephant throwing darts at balloons but missed the elephants playing soccer. The festival lasts 10 days but other than the first day it’s pretty much just a huge county fair. There are a bunch of fair rides and games, lots of food, and some Thai crafts. When I asked my students what they did at Ja Poa they told me ca bum which I just assumed was Thai, later to find out it was car bump. Of course we had to check out the bumper cars so Friday night we went. Turns out bumper cars in Thailand, well at least in Chaiyaphum, is the teenage hang out. Everyone was dancing on the ledge of the bumper cars or on the bumper car floor.

It's been awhile so here's an update on what we've been doing...

Christmas

We had a pretty low key Christmas. We had school on Friday and then went to another teacher’s house for a little while that evening. We got to talk to our families on skype and Dylan was there for the opening of the presents and I got to see the Christmas tree and snow, so it was a little like we were home for Christmas. Then we came back to our apartment and enjoyed some krapow moo (sweet basil and pork) and a bottle of wine.

New Years

Christmas might not be a big holiday here but New Years (Phi Mai) sure is. On the 30^th we had a New Year’s party at school for the teachers. I don’t know why I didn’t think about karaoke being involved considering most departments in the school have their own karaoke machine and during free periods spend their time entertaining each other. But before we even sat down with our food we had already been asked about karaoke. Dylan was a little more eager and was quite the crowd pleaser dancing around on stage, which of course meant he was called up to sing 5 songs. I on the other hand was asked to sing “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion. For those of you who haven’t heard me sing, I am slightly tone deaf. Anyways, the song was a way out of my range and as I tried to sneak off stage I was pulled into a duet with a male Thai teacher for song called “Evergreen Tree,” I’ve never heard it before so really it wasn’t much of a duet. But I quickly escaped and was only asked one more time to do karaoke, which was replaced with a request to dance. Any sort of party in Thailand means there will be dancing. And of course this means we must join in. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen traditional Thai dancing but the women keep there hands in an awkward position while the rotate their wrists, sounds easy enough and they make it look so graceful and easy, pretty sure this isn’t how I looked. In between songs they would call out raffle numbers and people would win rice cookers, microwaves, and a few big prizes including the small bookshelf we won. We were wondering how we’d manage to bring it home on our motorbike but a teacher offered so we never had to get to creative with that. Right now we’re keeping our cooking things on the shelves and our rice cooker on top, makes the apartment look a little more homey. It was a great night and fun to be with our teachers outside of school.

On Wednesday we headed to Laos to meet up with a bunch of the other teachers we met in Phuket. We spent the night in Vientiene, which is a really cute clean city about 6 hours from Chaiyaphum. There’s a large French influence there and the coffee shops and the small outdoor restaurants were a completely different feel from anywhere we’ve been in Thailand. The next morning we made our way to Vang Vieng to meet up with everyone for a few days of tubing, rope swing, slides, zip lines, bringing in the New Year, and so many baguettes. The town was full of foreigners from all over. It's a small beautiful town with the Nam Xong River flowing through the outskirts of town. The Nam Xong is just beautiful with cliffs surrounding the river. It was great to see everybody and a really fun long weekend; hopefully we’ll make it back there at some point in our travels. Now it's back to school with only 7 weeks left, it's flown by.

5k

This morning at 6am I met two of our friends to run a 5k, keep in mind even though it’s warm here right now it still is dark until about 6:30. We arrived to a mass of people ranging from 6 years old to probably 70. There was a 10k also, so most of the people around our age were running in that. As we ran we took note of how different this was from running in the U.S. Most students were wearing there school shoes, which really aren’t made for running and we even passed a couple kids without shoes. When we came through the finish line the announcer ran through with us. It was a lot of fun and we even got a medal and shirt.