Bali High

If you’ve never seen the classic musical, South Pacific, then you have no idea what the title to this post means.  Rather than making it easy for you, I’ll direct you to find the video in your local library and to watch it in its entirety.  I had to play in the pit band for this particular gem not once but twice, so I think it is only fair that I force you to suffer through it if you want to attain complete enlightenment. “Some enchanted evening…”  

Bali was wondrous. It had everything we could want. It is a one-stop tourist's dream. If you need a little of everything on your vacation and you have only a week or two, Bali is your place. But sadly, and this is entirely my fault, not Bali's, it was just okay for me.  What I mean is, if you hadn’t noticed, we have been out and about for a bit more than a week or two at this point. Eastern culture was beginning to get old for me. Now I’m not saying you should erase Bali as a destination from your bucket list.  By all means, go! You will have great fun!  The island is littered with impressive temples. It is just that the temples in Cambodia and Thailand are an entire level up on the impress-o-meter.  In addition, Bali does indeed have excellent scuba diving and snorkeling.  But our dive was not as good as ones I've been on in Hawaii or Mexico or the Caribbean.  The food was quite good, but no match for Thailand.  Bali has gorgeous mountains, but if you want that, I can think of dozens of easier locations to get to where the mountain scenery is equally majestic.  Bali’s people are incredibly friendly, but not quite so friendly as the Kiwi’s of New Zealand or the Ticos of Costa Rica or the Cambodians or even the French. Well, OK, maybe not the French. Just a little bad tasting humor there.

I know what you're thinking, and you've hit the nail on the head.  I’m a little jaded.  I’ve had too much of a good thing. Why shouldn’t you go to Bali and get nearly the best of all of these reasons to vacation in a one-stop shopping spree on one small Indonesian island?  After all, not everyone can spend a year traveling the globe seeking out the best of everything. But here is where my blog comes in handy.  Now you don’t have to seek out the best.  We’ve done the hard work for you!  Now you can just go directly to the best, without having to look for it!  You’re welcome.

In point of fact, we (yes, I am including myself) had a great time in Bali and are glad we saw it.  But for me, there was really very little that was new after six weeks of traveling in Japan and southeast Asia. We will go back to Hawaii again and again for the great weather and the beaches and the tropical island feel.  And those things are comparable in Bali.  It is just that Bali is so freaking far away, and there was really nothing to see there that we hadn’t seen already, only bigger, and better.  Again, I’m not sad we went.  How else would we have known?  But there you have it.  And I still do have details of our time to record.  So here it goes, and enough with the editorializing.  Just the facts:

We arrived at the airport and were picked up by a personal driver who drove us immediately to Ubud, the artistic center of the island, about an hour inland.  He dropped us off at our hotel and offered to give us a tour on another day; a proposal to which we agreed, with a smile.  Our hotel room was absolutely amazing.  It was huge when judging against most of the other places we’ve stayed.  It had a central living area and two large separate bedrooms each with its own full bathroom. The walls were twelve feet high, but not connected to the ceiling which was a sloping bamboo/thatch affair that towered a good twenty feet above us in the center, and left us with an open air feeling to the place.  There were exquisite hand carvings on the furniture and all of the dark wooden walls.   We loved the place, which was good, because our last day there was a national holiday and an annual day of rest for the locals.  This meant not only that we would not find anything open, but actually that we were by law restricted to our hotel room for the day.  No going out on the street was permitted.  Everyone was required to stay at home for the day.  So it was really fortunate that we loved our room.

Breakfast in the dining/living room in our fancy-schmancy suite.  Yes, that is an open air non-wall.  The kids' bedroom is through the doorway at the top of the picture.

Here's a different view, highlighting the roof.  You can just see the doorway to our bedroom at the bottom left.

This is that doorway when shut. That is all carved into the wood, and that kind of workmanship was everywhere in the hotel.

The day before the day of rest was a day of celebration.  It was a time to bury all of one’s demons and banish them to the underworld so one could start a new year fresh from fear and guilt.   The Balinese take this literally. Every Balinese village participated in building intricate yet enormous statues of plaster that were called Oga-Oga (which basically means monster or demon).  The locals paraded them around the streets at night, telling stories with song and dance.  We attempted to watch some of the parade but were so thwarted by the massive crowds that we gave up after about an hour and half having only seen two Oga-oga.  We had seen dozens of them in the days leading up to the big night, so we weren’t devastated, just a wee-bit disappointed.  In theory, the locals were supposed to burn their demons at midnight to banish them forever.  We did, however, see quite a few of these magnificent monstrosities still standing the next day.  It seems many people can’t bear to part with their creations after putting in so much hard work to build them.  

A couple of Oga-oga, each about 15 feet tall.

Here's another beauty.

And hard work seems to be a recurring theme in Bali.  We asked a few of the locals if they had ever been off the island, much less out of Indonesia altogether, and the answer was always “no”.  But the explanation was what was interesting about their answer.  Eventually many of them cited lack of money as a big reason for never travelling.  But that was never the first reason cited.  They always said that they, the Balinese, were too busy to go anywhere.  And I truly believe that.  They are constantly preparing offerings (often just artsy arrangements of flowers and plants and sometimes food) for their Hindu gods and they are putting in a tremendous amount of effort making these offerings.  They also seem to spend more time in prayer than seems possible while still going about your daily life.  But this is just “what you do” if you are Balinese.  They seem to reap enjoyment from it, so who am I to question it?  I simply wanted to explain what keeps them so busy day in and day out, so that they have no time for the frivolity of something like travel.

This stone carving in a temple wall had about a dozen "offerings" scattered about beneath it.

I think the best part of all of the offerings is the sheer number of beautiful statues that riddle the island.  There are easily more Buddha statues on the island then there are people.  They range from thimble-size to two-story building size.  But on top of that, there are also millions of carved or molded or otherwise created renditions of hundreds or maybe even thousands of different Hindu gods.  You cannot stand anywhere on the island and look about you, without spotting at least one statue somewhere, whether it be carved in stone, or wood, or made of gold or bronze or silver or pewter.  The artistry is brilliant.  But again, nothing we hadn’t seen, although in much less abundance, in Thailand or Cambodia or Malaysia or even Japan.  I imagine India to be much the same in this regard, as this is from where the Hindu gods originated. Morocco will be a marked change since the Muslim tradition requires that no images or likenesses ever be created. But enough about idols and religion.  Where’s the action?  Where’s the drama in this post?

We went river rafting one day in Ubud.  The rapids were small, but incessant, and so we had a lot of fun.  The highlights were supposed to be the waterfalls that emptied into the river on either side as more often then not we were between high cliff walls as we floated, and they were definitely beautiful, but we are really jaded when it comes to waterfalls at this point.  I imagine I’ll never go to Niagara, as it would be too much of a disappointment for me.  Maybe after a few years, I’ll have lost my tolerance for the things and will be a cheap travelling date once again. 

Josh got to kayak for half of the river while the rest of us had to stay in our raft.  That's him in the little boat.

For me the actual highlight of the rafting trip, other than winning the splashing war against the nearby boats, was the plethora of intricate carvings in the cliffwalls themselves.  No description would suffice.  But the carvings went on for at least a kilometer and went up many meters from the water level.  They were pretty cool.  I’ll let the pictures do the talking here.

Carvings like this went on forever on the cliff walls at river's edge.

Here's more.

And more.

What the heck.  One more with the goose.

We also went to the famous monkey forest in Ubud.  It was a very short walk from our hotel.  Hundreds of monkeys lived there and ate fruit fed to them by the tourists who could buy the fruit from vendors along the way.  We watched the baby monkeys for nearly forever.  We watched teenage monkeys wrestling with each other and with the tourists. We watched crotchety old grandpa monkeys who couldn’t be bothered to do anything other than bare their teeth at us.  It was all pretty cool, but again, we were already pretty monkeyed out before this, after the close encounters with monkeys in Costa Rica and in Cambodia and even in Kuala Lumpur.  I did have one little guy jump up and sit in my lap for a while. Then he sat on my head for another not so short while. And then, after all of that buddying up, he decided that he suddenly didn’t like me.  So he bit me on the arm.  No, he didn’t break the skin, so no, I won’t be foaming at the mouth any time soon.  And the biting monkey wasn’t nearly as bad as the monkey ten minutes earlier who decided to pee on me which I didn’t notice until I was nice and soaked.  But the temple that the monkeys lived in was quite impressive and the baby monkeys were pretty darn cute, so we had a splendid time all in all, despite the urine.

Told you they were cute.

The guys on either side of the staircase, not so cute.

OK, now we're talking whole new levels of cute.

Other than the monkeys and the rafting trip, Ubud was about chillin’ at our beautiful hotel, getting some homework done, and making arrangements for our Europe trip.  We did do a lot of window-shopping and would have loaded up on beautiful artsy souvenirs, but alas, our suitcases are too full to fit anything new.

Our personal driver finally did give us that tour of the southern half of the island.  It was mostly more temples and more waterfalls.  One temple was called the temple of the Holy Water.  There were hundreds of natives all squished like sardines in a swimming pool fed with water pouring out the walls of the temple.  The line to get in the pool was enormous.  I guess that Holy Water really works.  We never did figure out what exactly made it holy.  When Carol asked, the driver’s reply was that it was because it was in the temple.  So which came first?  The temple or the water?  Why is the water in other temples not considered holy?  We’ll never know.

You'd think it was holy tequila or something, with this many people wanting in.

On our little island tour, we did get to stop at an especially beautiful rice farm where the terracing of the rice fields was exquisitely done.  That was new for us, since we decided to skip Vietnam.  You had to be there to appreciate the beauty of it.  For the kids, even being there wasn’t enough to make appreciation happen.  But I guess I could say that about a lot of the stops we’ve made on this trip. 

All that stuff that looks like grass?  That's all rice.

If you want to enter one of the temples, you've got to put on a sarong.  I make this look good.

Even the trees in the temples have to wear a skirt.

This one is called the elephant cave temple.

After the tour, we said a teary goodbye to our driver and he dropped us off at our hotel in Denpasar.  We had three days to appreciate the beach.  Carol and I did just that on our second night when we ate dinner literally on the beach (sand in our toes) as we watched the sunset while we chowed down on every kind of seafood known to human beings in one meal.  I distinctly remember an entire fish (eyeballs and all), shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, calamari, and scallops.  I’m probably forgetting something, but really we were paying more attention to the sunset then we were to the food.  The sunset was “brilliant”, as our new British friends are fond of saying.  Sadly, we didn’t have our camera at the time, and we didn’t get back the next night.

Here's a sunrise at the airport when we had to leave.  Not quite as good as the beach sunset, but not too shabby either.

Even more sad, however, was the next day, when we went back to the beach after it had been raining for awhile.  It was less a beach, than a dump.  There was so much trash in the ocean and on the sand that you couldn’t take a step without touching something plastic.  Josh tried to get in the water once, but he was quickly grossed out.  I was so depressed, that I had to go back to the hotel immediately.  Carol continued to walk along the beach for a mile or so.  She says that the trash situation was not a problem much further down near a resort hotel.  I guess the hotel pays people to clean up their section of the beach.  But her story didn’t lighten my mood any.  I just get so worked up when I am reminded how poorly we as human beings do at our duty as stewards for the Earth.  Bali is supposed to be a little bit of heaven on Earth.  Instead, at least at that stretch of beach, it was just nasty.  No, I didn't take any pictures of this.  I don't want to remember it.

The only activity we did while staying in Denpasar was a morning scuba trip.  We were picked up from the hotel and driven about an hour and a half to a cozy little cove where a boat awaited us.  Carol and I did an hour scuba-dive and the kids snorkeled under the supervision of the captain.  The visibility was perfect.  The number of creatures was impressive.  But the variety was only so-so.  We saw garden eels sticking their heads out of the sand.  I saw a lobster, but only for a split second because it scooted under a rock and out of sight.  I had no idea lobsters could move so fast.  We saw a baby reef shark.  There were thousands of jellyfish that were fun to squish (think Dory in “Finding Nemo”) and about a dozen or so species of tropical fish including Nemo’s (clownfish).  It wasn’t the best dive trip we’ve ever had, but it was good fun.  For the kids, the highlight had nothing to do with ocean-life.  While we were heading back to shore, the captain let the kids sit on the stabilizing rails that hung out from either side of the boat.  Rather than trying to explain what I mean, I’ll let the pictures show it all.

To get an idea of what I mean by "stabilizers" on the boat.  Look at how beautiful the water is!

Josh flying back to the beach.

One gratuitous underwater shot.

Even a couple of days before we left Bali, I think we were all ready to go.  This was to be our last stop in Asia (if Indonesia is even considered part of Asia).  We had had our fill of Eastern culture, at least for a while.  Carol and I were looking forward to Morocco and then Europe and all that Western culture brings.  The kids were looking forward to the Singapore Airlines flight and to the Singapore airport itself, which is more of an amusement park and shopping mall than it is an airport.  We have had maybe too much of a good thing.  We slept in eighteen different places in six different countries in Asia.  We have that feeling you get when you’ve been out in the sun all day and are now bone-tired.  Only we’ve been out in the sun for six months and could really use some sub-thirty degree (Celsius) temperatures for a bit.  Not that the Moroccan desert will cure what ails us.  But at least it will be a dry heat, which is a whole lot different.  Sub-hundred-percent humidity will be nice too.  And how could we not look forward to a camel ride in the Sahara?

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Steve

Thailand is Elysium, for I shall not be coming home

Steve:  As was revealed in my second to last post, not the taxi rant, Thailand didn’t start off so well for us.  The trip to Trang was long, hot, and exhausting.  Even after the thirteen hour train ride, we still had a two hour taxi ride to endure as well.  Trang itself was absolutely nothing to write home about, so I won’t.  But Trang was never meant to be anything but a point to pass through.  And the very next morning, an angel appeared from the heavens and carried us back there for three of the most memorable days I’ve ever experienced.  Our angel’s name was Tom.  He was to be our guide for our island hopping tour around the Trang islands.  Most people who visit Thailand go instead to the KohPeepee islands near Phuket (I’m certain I spelled that wrong, but we didn’t go there anyway, so I’m not looking it up, deal with it.)  The Trang islands are also in the Andaman Sea, west of the southern tail of the country, only they are maybe 100 km further south than Koh Peepee.  I’m sure Carol chose our spot because she found some sort of internet deal and jumped on it.  I honestly cannot imagine a better experience than the one we had, so those other islands can just Koh-pee without us.  We don’t need ‘em.

This chapter of the Thies Family Adventure began with an hour-long drive out of Trang proper and into the countryside until we hit the beach town from where we would disembark.  With each kilometer away from the noise and the smell and the dirty feeling of the city, our blood pressure dropped another notch.  Our boat awaited, and when I say our boat, I mean that we were the only people on the boat for the entire adventure, unless you include the captain and first-mate of the craft, Tom, and Tom’s assistant, who was learning to be a guide as well, and was therefore one more person who had nothing to do but pamper us.  We boarded and took off immediately after only one scheduled stop where Tom picked up multiple bags of potato chips and soft drinks to keep the kids happy, which, of course, worked like a charm.

Thankfully we only had to wear the lifejackets for the two minutes in the harbor, not for the whole three day trip.

Out the front of our boat.  Let's get this party started!

I cannot begin to describe each moment of fun that we had for the next three days.  It would require too many bytes of storage space on my hard drive.  Instead I will hit on a few highlights for me and hope not to forget the rest simply by perusing the thousands of photos we took during those five days.  The islands jut out of the water like in no other place in the world outside of Thailand and Vietnam.  They were so picturesque that our camera’s memory card nearly overheated.  The ocean water was cool enough to be refreshing, but warm enough to allow for jumping right in without so much as a shiver.  We did so often.  Seven or eight times we snorkeled, whenever there was a coral reef nearby.  My favorite part of the snorkeling was the vibrant blue and purple GIANT clams that would close when you got nearby but then open right back up the moment you backed off.  I could have fit my entire head in many of them if they ever stayed open long enough to attempt it, and assuming I was okay with losing my head.  They didn’t and I wasn’t.  Carol’s favorite part was the lionfish that just hovered and posed and dared us to reach out and touch it so it could poison us and eat us for supper.

Dozens more like these.

A couple of clams just parting their lips.

The centers of the thousands of sea urchins were irridescent.

Fishies, fishies everywhere.

When we weren’t snorkeling, we simply frolicked on a beach or in the water with no other soul visible for miles.  The crew made us a picnic lunch on one day, which came complete with chicken curry and vegetable stir-fry and a whole roasted fish.  Each night we slept at a different tiny island resort each with quaint rooms and excellent restaurants.  In fact, I think “excellent restaurant” is redundant in Thailand.  The food is so good everywhere that I found myself pounding multiple helpings of spicy curry at each meal despite knowing full well that my stomach was in a constant state of turmoil and that I really should have been munching on saltines and sipping ginger-ale.  But I digress. I’ll talk more about food when I describe our cooking school experience.

Josh preferred the ocean fishing to the snorkeling.  We mostly were fishing for squid.  They were frisky little guys, about a foot long, maybe 16 inches to the end of their longest tentacles(?) and they would try to ink you even when they were beyond hope in the bucket in the boat.  One inked all of us as Tom disconnected it from the line.  Carol was laughing so hard at Chloe and I, covered in black ink, that she failed to realize she got it worse than the rest of us. No harm was done except to our precious egos.  Really, the captain of the boat was just using us to catch his lunch every day.  He knew we weren’t going to eat the squid.  I swore off calamari back in Japan.  But he was pumped to get the grub.

Chloe bagged the first one.  Looks delicious!

In order to catch the squid, we all were given an empty plastic water bottle with a long fishing line rolled up around it, on the end of which was a weighted, barbed plastic fish-shaped lure.  You hold on to the bottle and fling the lure, letting the line unravel at least 25 meters.  Then you just keep jerking at the line hoping for a bite.  Carol got one the first day.  Chloe got two the next.  I finally got one near the end of the last day, but poor Josh, who was the one insisting we keep trying day after day, just couldn’t get a bite.  In the very last minutes on the boat, after the rest of us had all given up on fishing and were readying ourselves to ride to shore, Josh finally got a bite and pulled it in, but he lost it ten feet from the boat.  He refused to concede defeat and ten minutes later he caught another one.  There was much rejoicing, but alas, it was premature.  He lost this one after he had pulled it all the way out of the water.  It just fell off the barb at the last possible moment.  Josh did absolutely nothing wrong, there wasn’t a technique that he failed to master or anything.  He just couldn’t catch a break.  Poor guy was beside himself for the whole ride home.  We told him we would just record it in the history books that he caught two squid, because technically he did.  But he would have none of it.  In his mind, unless the captain got to eat it, he’d caught nothing and he wanted me to blog it that way.  So I guess, even if Josh never bagged a squid, at least he showed that he has learned well some valuable lessons on both perseverance and integrity.

The absolute best part of the island hopping tour was our visit to the pirate cave on Ko Mook.  Apparently pirates used to use the well-hidden spot to store their booty in centuries past.  With our boat anchored about 50 meters from the small opening of a cave, we all swam through the waves into the entrance and then swam another 50 meters or so through the dark tunnel.  The swim was awesome, with stalactites reaching down just a few inches from the water level in parts, and an eerie glow to the water from tricks of the reflecting and refracting sunlight off of and through it.  After a turn in the tunnel that hid our destination, we were suddenly on a small beach in the middle of the otherwise beachless island, surrounded by 360 degrees of tree laden rocky cliffs that rose hundreds of feet above us.  There was simply no way into this gorgeous little oasis, save by helicopter lift I guess, other than through that cave.  We stayed just long enough to marvel at the unlikeliness of it all.  We even got to watch a sea snake enjoy the cove along with us.  We would have stayed longer than the half an hour or so that we did, but the tide was rising quickly and there would soon be no air in the tunnel for the trip back out.  I suppose this is now a very popular tourist destination, but since it had been raining out of season the couple of days previous and even that morning, very few others chose that time to check the place out.  So we had it all to ourselves for most of the time.   We are lucky ducks, indeed.

The water level in the cave was significantly higher on the way back out.

Our own private hidden cove in the crater of an extinct volcano.

The cave entrance is behind Chloe.  No way out but that way.  Where did that snake go?

Our serpentine friend.

The end of the tour was a stay at an island resort that I’d be happy to live in until I’m ninety-three.  The entire staff was smitten with Josh and they embarrassed him with attention at every step.  The food, as usual, was delectable.  The beach was almost completely empty and the view over the water from our front porch (especially at sunset, as we faced directly west) was out of this world.  We did leave the resort a couple of times but only under duress.  

Our home for three delectable days and nights.  Chloe and Josh had their own hut a few doors down.

Playing frisbee on our nearly private beach.

Nice front porch view!

The first trip was a guided tour of the island including a visit to the local school where a sweet little girl about Josh’s age read us the Thai alphabet.  Every letter sounds the same!  There are sixty some letters if you include all of the vowels, which are separate entities in their eyes.  She would read three or four distinct letters in a row and we would be absolutely certain that she was simply repeating herself.  The inflection differences were so subtle that I think it would be impossible for me to ever learn the language.  My ear is simply not good enough.  

The Thai alphabet minus the vowels.

Third grade hard at work.

An interesting find in the classroom.

After the school visit, we were treated to lunch at a local woman’s house.  She had prepared a six-course meal for us and we ate it on her front porch.  Her three year old granddaughter sat there the whole time gawking at us with our white skin and our light colored hair.  To her, it was as if we were from Saturn.  Though that may be a bad analogy, as Saturn may be closer to heaven than the Earth.  On this trip we also got to learn all about the island’s number one industry.  Rubber tree tapping and the work that goes into producing rubber is not at all a simple process.  But it is fascinating.  Chloe and Josh also got to try their hands at Batik art.  We will be bringing home their creations to enjoy for posterity.  

Our hosts for lunch.

Trying our hands at Batik art.

Rubber mats hanging to dry.  One step in a labor intensive process.

Our second trip was a self-guided tour of the rest of the island on rented motorbikes.  Josh absolutely refused to ride with Carol.  It was ride with Dad or no ride at all.  Shows you his confidence in his mom’s driving skills.  I don’t know if he was scared about a lack of coordination, or of strength, or of reflexes, or a combination thereof.  All I know is that this was non-negotiable.  Josh and I did have a blast cruising along at up to 55 mph.  Carol and Chloe were a bit more on the cautious side.  

Two-wheelin' it.

To our collective dismay, the day finally arrived that we had to say good-bye to the islands and come back to reality.  Well, Thies-family type reality anyway, meaning we were out of Nirvana and back on the planet Earth, albeit some of the more awe-inspiring parts of planet Earth. 

Our next destination would be Kanchanaburi, a town one hundred miles west of Bangkok and a whole lot farther than that from the Trang islands.  The commute consisted of six distinct links in a chain of transportation (boat, car, train, car, bus, car).  The train was another one of those overnight jobs like the one we took from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Hat Yai, our very first stop in Thailand.  But this second train was the Thai version rather than the Malaysian version, and it was a little bit nicer.  At least the bunks could be converted into seats during the daylight hours.  Even though the entire trip took about 25 hours, it was relatively painless.  No horror stories, just a bunch of weary travellers.

"We have to do what, next?"

Kanchanaburi was the destination of choice because this is where we had chosen to ride elephants!  Though this wouldn’t actually happen until the third day there, I wanted to start with it, because it was the number one reason for going to Thailand for all of us.  We didn’t want to ride on seats mounted on elephants, we wanted to ride bareback!  And we wanted to do it in a place where they treated the animals with love and respect, rather than as dumb beasts of burden put on this planet solely for our recreation.  Elephant World in Kanchanaburi is that place.  The motto for the reserve is “Where the elephants don’t work for us, we work for them!”  But I won’t tell this part of the story.  I will leave that job up to Josh:

Big Hairy Elephants

In a town called Kanchanaburi in Thailand, my family went to a place called “Elephants’ World.” It is kind of obvious that there are a bunch of elephants there.  But what may not be obvious is that you get to feed them, and play with them, and ride on them.  It is more than just a zoo where you only get to watch them.  It is a preserve where old and injured elephants can live without being put in danger or without having to work for their food.  Many of the elephants there would not have survived if they weren’t taken care of at “Elephant’s World.” 

When we got there, the first thing we did was feed the elephants their breakfast.  We all stood on a deck so that we were level with the elephants’ heads.  We would place the food right on the elephants’ curled up trunks.  The trunks were wrinkly and a bit slobbery on the very tip.  It was amazing how much stuff they could do with their trunks.  They could pick up tiny pellets the size of “Nerds” candy with no trouble. The oldest elephant, who was 71, needed her food put right in her mouth because she didn’t have good control of her trunk anymore.  We fed all of the adult elephants pineapple and banana, but the only thing we fed the baby was jicama.  The baby was cute because only the tip of its trunk could reach the deck that we were standing on. It is crazy how much elephants eat, even the baby.  They eat for over twelve hours in a day and each bite is the size of a full meal for us.

After the feeding we chopped bananas off their stems.  The stems are not just grouped by six or seven bananas that you see connected in a grocery store.  They come off of gigantic stems that are two inches wide and two feet tall.  They hold something like 150 bananas on them.  It was really fun to do that because my dad and a couple from the UK were good choppers and it was my job to chuck the smaller bunches into the bed of a pickup truck that we had to fill to the brim.  After the chopping, we rode in the truck to move the bananas to the storage room.  On the ride, we were knee deep in bananas.  Henceforth, my proper name shall be “The Banana Master!” 

The next task was to make sticky rice for the elephants.  There were huge pots filled with rice and fruit and vegetables that we were cooking over big outdoor fire pits. Since the fire was so hot, we used long rowboat paddles for stirring spoons.  After that job was finished, I was famished.  Lucky me, it was lunchtime.  I ate ten chicken wings and five pieces of watermelon.  It was tasty.  The next thing we did was unusual.  We floated down a river.  We jumped in the River Kwai wearing life jackets and we were very surprised to be pushed down the river going about ten miles an hour.  It took about half an hour to get to where we were going (which I will tell you about later) and those thirty minutes were cold, but still a blast.  When we got to the end of the ride, everything was gloomy, and then leafy, and then very white, and then very banana tree like.  Then we were back in Elephant World again.  Oh wait, I need to back up.  Rewinding, rewinding…  OK.

It started out gloomy because at the edge of the river there were all of these dead trees that we had to scamper past up the bank.  Then it got leafy because we had to climb through all of the leaves that had fallen off of those trees.  The white part was the dusty road between the top of the riverbank and the banana tree farm.  When we got to the farm, the elephants’ Mahouts (I’ll explain that in a bit) cut down the trees, and we, the visitors, carried them down to the truck.  It was fun doing it, but also quite heavy.  We filled one pickup truck bed so high with banana tree trunks, that it could barely move. It was surprising to find out that elephants will eat the whole tree, including the tree trunks!  All twenty of us climbed into a different truck (not the banana tree truck) but it wasn’t nearly as weighed down as the poor truck that carried the trees back to Elephant’s World.  As we climbed in, one woman handed me a jackfruit.  The ooze that came out was really sticky, like glue.  And before I knew it, it was all over me.

Back in Elephant World, we fed the elephants the sticky rice we made.  There was a simple system of making it now that it had cooled down after cooking.  First you got a handful of sticky rice with flies all over it, then you shaped it into a ball, and then you roll it in this edible dust so that it keeps its shape. Some elephants like different sized balls than others.  And if you don’t give them the right size, it ends up scattered all over the ground. 

After we fed them the sticky rice it was finally time to play with the elephants in the water.  Every elephant has its own mahout.  This is a local person who spends their whole life with the same one elephant.  They feed it, bathe it, and take care of it. Each mahout brought his elephant down into the water to cool it down and to play with it.  This was my favorite part.  I jumped in by using a Tarzan swing that they had set up by the pool and then swam to the elephant nearest the baby.  The mahout helped Chloe and I up onto the elephant's back.  The baby elephant tried, but failed, to trample Chloe and I as we rode on the big one.  She kept standing up and then lying down again and dunking herself and us under the water.  It was prickly sitting there from all of the hair on her back and head.  But being able to hold on to the elephant was an amazing experience.  I had never done anything like it.  How about you?

Feeding jicama to "Baby"

Choppin' bananas from the bunch

Riding with the thousand or so bananas for the afternoon meal.

Best day ever.

Does this hat make me look fat?

Floating down the river.  Despite my expression in the moment, it was a total blast.

Those faces say it all.

Are there any openings in Mahout school?

Steve:  Kanchanaburi is also the town where the “death train” crosses the Bridge over the River Kwai.  We rode the train and crossed the bridge and learned a whole lot about the Japanese takeover of Southeast Asia during WWII.  Nobody deserves to have an atomic bomb dropped on them, no matter how egregious their crimes.  But I have to say, the Japanese were absolutely deserving of some sort of smackdown.  Unprovoked invasion is bad enough, but they did not treat their prisoners of war nicely, at all.  But enough of that. What is far more important is our afternoon on the train, not the years of suffering that hundreds of thousands who built the train needed to endure, right?  :)

A shot of the River Kwai out the window of the "Death Train".

We thought we were getting a quick half hour ride along the river.  There was obviously a misunderstanding.  We were on that train for over two hours, which would have been fine, if we hadn’t just been on a train for fifteen hours the day before.  The kids were a bit cranky.  It’s not like they were fans of the classic Hollywood movie about the bridge and were pumped for a history lesson.  But the trip can’t be about snorkeling and fishing and beach resorts all the time, can it?  And we were going to ride elephants the next day, so they could just suck it up and deal.  A little ice cream helped. 

Our other bit of fun in Kanchanaburi was at Erawan Falls National Park.  There are a series of seven different waterfalls, each a few hundred meters apart that you can hike up to along a mountain river.  Each was picture worthy.  Each had a pool at the bottom that you could swim in along with the thousands of fish that wanted desperately to nibble your toes.  The fourth fall from the bottom (and from the top, for that matter) had natural rock waterslides that kept the kids busy for a while.  I managed to trip on a tree root and mangle my foot at the very top of the hike, in plain view of the seventh and final waterfall.  The hike back down was quite difficult, and I am still limping an entire country and at least a week later.  But I’m still glad we did the hike.  Even though it seems we have seen so many world-class waterfalls on this trip, they never cease to transfix me with their majesty. 

Had to include one gratuitous shot at Erawan Falls.

OK, maybe two.

Our hotel in Kanchanaburi was a pretty sweet place in its own right.  It is owned by a former Brit and his Thai wife.  He did the schmoozing (and I guess the occasional bookwork) and she did the cooking.   He had a pretty sweet deal.  This woman could cook!  We each ordered something different at each of four or five separate meals that we ate at the hotel.  And not one of the dishes would rate less than a 9.8 out of 10 stars.  Carol and I stuck to Thai food offerings.  But the kids often ordered things like spaghetti, and even those meals were out of this world good.  All told in Thailand, I think Josh ordered pad thai about 15 times.  Dude likes his pad thai.  It is about the only thing on the menu that I’m not enthralled with.  But here I go, droning on about food again.  I just can’t help it.  Thai food is superior to most everything else on the planet in my book.  I’m going to keep my mind open, and my mouth too.  Perhaps Italy or France will change my thinking.  But I doubt it.

In any case, food is a good segue to our next venue, because our very next stop after Kanchanaburi was Bangkok.  And after that fiasco of a trip into the city, which I have fully documented in my last post, the very first thing we did in Bangkok was take a Thai cooking class.  Even the kids were enrolled.  And they did a fine job, I might add.  We were taken shopping in the local market where we were taught about all kinds of herbs and spices and fruits and vegetables that we hadn’t heard of.  Then we were walked through the making of spring rolls, pad-thai, Masamun curry, and banana fritters.  We got to eat the results of our efforts and we got cookbooks to bring home so we can recreate the experience as often as we like.  I’m thinking four or five times a week will be sufficient.

Just getting started on that curry recipe.

In lieu of the bike tour that we were originally going to take, but opted of due to exhaustion and a bum-foot, we got started much later and went on a self-guided walking tour of the many royal palaces and temples that line the river in Bangkok.  The Thai people love their gold statues and their rock statues and their jade statues and well, you get the picture.  We got many a history lesson as well as a lesson on Hinduism and Buddhism and a few other ‘–isms as we walked and gawked.  My favorite part was the two hundred foot long golden reclining Buddha.  I think Carol’s favorite part was the plethora of food stands that lined the way, especially the ones that sold fresh fruit on a stick.  Feel like some pineapple?  Why not?  How about some mango?  It is all cut up and ready to go, after all.  Maybe just this once…  Or maybe just this twice…  Picture that type of scenario, only half a dozen times an hour for three or four hours of walk and gawk.  Okay, I exaggerate.  But we did snack an awful lot.

Reclining Buddha

They have a scale model of Ankgwor Wat in the Royal Palace in Bangkok.  We could have saved a trip!  :)

These guys stand guard at everything in Bangkok.  Seriously, they are everywhere.  Even in the airport.

Wat Pho

The tourists spots are all still still very much used for their original purpose.

Our hotel in Bangkok was pretty far down a rather dark alley, and it had an extremely unassuming sign out front that could be quite easily missed.  But it was a very cool place on the inside.  We took many pictures of the murals on the walls because they were so unlike every other part of Asia that we’d been to.  Rather than describe it, I will include one picture so that you can glean my meaning. 

That is all just a painting on the wall.  Multiple stories like this.  Pretty cool.

Bangkok was a short stop.  We really only went there because that is where the airport is, and we had a flight to catch to Bali.  We were curious to see the city, but we were far more interested in spending time with elephants and waterfalls and giant clams than we were with eight million city-folk.  So as quickly as we came, we left.  We had a quick layover in Singapore, and then it was on to Indonesia, our very last stop in Asia.  As I write this I am sitting in our hotel room in Ubud.  This room is so nice that they are going to have to use a crowbar to pry me away when it is time to leave.  But that story is for the next post.  So you are just going to have to wait for it.

Selamat Tinggal for now…