First of
all, let me just explain why I’ve been a bit behind with my blogging.
I am currently uploading a new version of Adobe because I am
trying to find “Educational TV Shows for ESL Little Kids that Teach
Prepositions.” Surprisingly, there isn’t a whole lot. I might have found one
good TV show (to be determined), but my Adobe player is out of date. I’m also
cutting up pictures of little animals for a 3-7 year old group I’ll be tutoring
starting tomorrow for extra cash (and because it sounded too cute to pass up—although
3-7 sounds like a ridiculous age gap, which makes me nervous).
Meanwhile,
I’ve spent today grading tests, creating new
tests (midterms are coming up!), creating projects, realizing over and over
again how many different ways I’ve secretly been messing up my grading system
(and then thinking—screw it, nothing I can do about it now), and trying not to
rip my hair out every time a student wants to just sit and chat while I’m
trying my absolute hardest just to make sure, at the very minimum, I have a
lesson prepared 3 seconds before I enter the classroom.
Along with
all this, I’ve been lugging my suitcase to school with me on Fridays so that,
at exactly 4:29, I can run out the door to catch the next bus/plane/van going
towards whichever town I’ve chosen as my next vacation destination, arranging
meet-ups with friends, and figuring out how to do the reverse-trip back on
Sunday so I can wake up bright and early Monday morning and start all over
again.
I’m not
complaining. It’s certainly not a bad lifestyle—I mean yes, it’s challenging,
but it also means I get to have amazing weekend experiences, and if in exchange
I have to feel a little exhausted and frustrated, I’ll take it any day.
I mostly
say all this just to explain why I’ve had such a difficult time finding a
chance to blog. But I’m putting aside my TV show hunt for the moment (and
thinking maybe I’ll just have them color instead), to write about my last two
weekends.
We had two
three-day weekends in a row because it is Thailand and they love any excuse to
go home and sleep. I mean, technically, they were both holiday weekends. But
when I asked the students what they do on these holidays, they said,
exasperated, “Nothing, teacher. Nothing. Really, nothing.”
“Do you
hang out with your family—maybe have a family dinner, at least?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you go
to temple? Is it a religious holiday?”
“No.”
“Does
anyone in the entire country do anything, even if you don’t?”
“Not
really.”
Regardless,
I was ready to celebrate.
Khon Kaen
Friday, immediately
after school (two weekends ago), Devon and I took a bus to Khon Kaen. Khon Kaen
is a great city in the Northeast. It’s excitingly urban for our region—it has a
mall with The Body Shop and Aunt Annies, a few Western restaurants (yes, the
taco shells are so crunchy you might break a tooth, and the breakfast is still
waffles with ice cream and condensed milk and fruit syrup on top, but still), a
temple that is 9-stories high, and a very expansive Saturday night market with
literally everything you can think of—delicious food (they had gyros! That
means bread people!), animals for sale (goats, different types of dogs, cats in
outfits, bunnies in outfits, birds, etc.), clothing, Kylie Jenner lip kits,
English-language books, caricature artists, bags, Ray Bans, Nike sneakers (the
brand items I just listed are cheap and fake rip offs, but they really do look
the same)… the list goes on.
Saturday we
did exactly all of these things. We woke up and found ourselves a “Western”
breakfast, which, to the Thais, means the sweetest and most high-calorie
dessert you can think of (start with a waffle or a pancake, add scoops of ice
cream, drizzle with condensed milk and chocolate sauce, add honey on the side,
put some ‘natural’ fruit on top, and you might be getting close to what Thai’s
think we want in the morning). After eating, we made our way to this 9-story
temple. It was beautiful and elaborate and shiny and expansive, as they all
are, with a great view of the lake and the tops of buildings.
At the peak,
we asked a monk to take a selfie with us (is that allowed?). His name is Novice
Bounlerd. I know this because, after we spoke for a few minutes, he said, “Can
I have your Line and Facebook account?” Line is, well, essentially my phone
number. A few minutes before, we’d been contemplating whether or not it was
appropriate to take a picture with a monk, and now here we were, getting hit on
by one.
“Sure!” I
agreed quickly because I felt it was probably very bad karma to refuse.
Many of
you, if we are friends on Facebook, have probably since gotten a friend request
from him. It seems he wants to expand his social media circle—sorry about that.
A few
minutes after I left the temple, I got a couple of messages in a row from him (which
seems common for many of the Thai people I’ve met here… they aren’t bothered if
you answer or not, they will just keep sending you new messages on top of the
old). His messages were: “Hello, do you remember me. I’m Novice. Good night.
Have a good dream. Bye bye.”
I said,
“Yes, I remember you! Thanks for the chat today.”
He said,
“Never mind.” (We think he thinks this means, “You’re welcome.”)
Then, long
story short, after a few more messages he sent me a very eerie-sounding voice message
via Facebook of himself saying, “Helllooooo, Caroline… I would like you to
explain to me the difference between the U.S. education system and Thailand.
Please tell me immediately.” He said these words slowly, stretching out the
“hello” for so long that his voice withered off at the end. Then he sent me a
bunch of pictures of himself giving a speech for a university class he’s taking
and said, “Excuse me! Where are the pictures of us!”
I’ve
decided I am willing to take whatever bad karma I might receive for not
responding to him.
After the
temple, we went to this big mall and then travelled to the night market. Here,
I spent about 1,000 baht ($30… not a lot, until you think about how the cost of
my plane ticket was also 1,000 baht). I bought a delicious chicken gyro wrap
for dinner, mango sticky-rice for dessert, a light blue dyed shirt that looks
ridiculous on me, a cute tank top-short combo (made of the same fabric) that
looked trendy on the manikin but also looks ridiculous on me, two English-language
books, a bag, and some white sneakers I plan on ruining at New Years.
We had a
lot of fun walking around and returned to our hostel exhausted.
The next
morning, we got ourselves up by 7 a.m. and made our way to 7-11, where we
picked up breakfast, and then ventured to the bus station.
So, the
thing is, I’d been told by a friend I work with, Teacher Ying, as well as a few
of my students, that there is this beautiful hiking mountain in Petchabun. They
showed me a few pictures, first of themselves at the top of a mountain,
watching the sunrise, and then of this huge five-headed Buddha statue,
overlooking these very Swiss-looking fields. The region is even considered “The
Swiss Alps of Thailand.” I couldn’t wait. I even wanted to leave on Saturday,
but my friends convinced me to stay in Khon Kaen Saturday night for the night
markets. Seriously, this was the one trip to which I was so looking forward. I just imagined myself hiking to these stunning
peaks and overlooking views so beautiful that I would be overcome, all at once,
with the deepest love and admiration for Thailand that I’ve felt so far.
After one
3-hour bus ride to Lom Sok, where we’d been told we’d find a connecting bus to
Petchabun, I stood at the bus terminal and showed them my Google-translated
sentence: “Petchabun National Park. We want to hike.”
“Hike?”
They repeated, clearly barely understanding the meaning of the word, yet slowly
shaking their heads. “No. You drive. Cannot hike.”
“We don’t
want to drive,” we tried to explain. “We want to hike.” Why, I began thinking
nervously, do they think we need to drive to the top?
“National
park,” I repeated, and they nodded slowly. “Okay, bus 11.”
We got on
this bus and started winding our way up a mountain, moving slowly because the
turns were sharp. I’d pulled my GPS up on my phone, and it said we were
45-minutes away from the national park when the bus pulled over to the side and
the lady pointed to us. “Farang (foreigners), off.”
Off? We were literally halfway up a
mountain, surrounded by absolutely nothing of importance, stopped in front of a
wooden bench that was meant to constitute as a bus stop. And we were 45-minutes
from where we wanted to go.
And yet,
the bus was headed in the wrong direction. What were we supposed to say, “No,
can you actually take a left here and take us to the national park—we
understand you don’t speak English and we don’t speak Thai, but regardless, we
refuse to get off”? So, we got off.
At this
point it was almost 2 p.m. We were starving and so fed up. We’d been travelling
since 8 and had originally assumed we’d be hiking by noon. Instead, it felt
like we’d just been wasting the whole day. Frustrated, we tried to ask a few
different people how exactly we were supposed to get to the national park, and
of course, we got plenty of different answers (take a taxi for 1,000 baht; take
a bus; you’re here.)
Finally, we
were told to take a songtaew. We decided it sounded like the cheapest and easiest
option. We stayed on the side of the road until one pulled up, and then we
hopped in the back. We sat on top of large blue bags of rice, laughing because
of the absurdity of it all, while two young Thai girls stared at us wide-eyed,
probably thinking, Mom, who the hell did
you just pick up.
We drove
for a few minutes and began to relax. It was hard not to, in a place like this.
There were so many bright green strawberry fields and hills and mountains—it
was just beautiful. And then the woman took a sharp left turn and drove us down
a dirt road, parked in front of her house (presumably), and turned off the
engine. She got out, as did the girls, and they sat around this table outside with
a few other women and children. A few men began unloading the rice after we got
off, and meanwhile, this gathering of women stared at us as if they’d brought
us here just to say, “Look what I found wandering around out there.” One woman
literally had a bag of chips.
At this
point, my friends were exasperated. I was too, a little bit. I mean, my god. We
just wanted to get to this STUPID national park. What were we doing? Why
couldn’t anything just go right, and be easy, for once?
One of my
friends called her Thai coordinator so we could use him as a translator. After
a few minutes, we began to understand the story.
Thai
translation-conversations, as a side-note, take forever. I have no idea why. An
example might be: I say, “Hello.” And then my translator says, “ehte hwatheh
twhhhasgb sad bga beb ehwhq dhhe hasdhe qyleg hdh ahd………” and five full minutes
later, my translator will say, “She says ‘hello,’ too.”
So, after a
few minutes, we finally begin to understand that this lady is a “tour” guide (I
am sure this is a loose term, generally meaning—“a woman looking for extra
cash, who does not know English and has no credentials, but who is willing to
drive foreigners around when she finds them on the side of the road”). She is apparently
willing to drive us to the top of a mountain, and find us accommodation and
dinner, etc., and drive us back to the bus station tomorrow, for 2,000 baht.
At first,
we considered just calling it a day. At 3:30, we honestly said, “Is it too
early to go to bed?” We were just so tired of trying to get them to understand
us, and all of the miscommunication that led us here in the first place. Then,
on top of it all, my friend Marly realized she’d left her wallet on the bus.
Finally,
however, we realized that this was really our only option. I mean, if we said
no—then what? Where would we stay? How would we get there? Where the hell WERE
we, anyway?
So we
agreed. She drove us, as promised, to this beautiful lookout point. A lot of
tents were pitched in the area (although I understood, finally, that this was
not a hiking spot—you just drove your car up a road and pitched a tent at the
top, there was no hiking option), but, slightly terrified, we kept repeating,
“We don’t want tent. We want real bed. No tent. Bed. Go down mountain please.”
We were just not interested in any more crazy adventures. We saw a beautiful
sunset, ate chicken and vegetables with our quiet Thai “guide,” and then drove
back down the mountain. She stopped at some bells so that we could hit them
with some wooden sticks (worth the trip right there), and then asked us for
1,000 baht. We grudgingly handed it over, and then she left us at a hostel. We
didn’t even mind sharing one King-sized bed between the four of us, even though
it meant we slept sideways on the bed.
And the
thing is, maybe this day was a “waste,” and maybe it was “disastrous,” if I
want to take the perspective of someone who expected something much, much
different. But then, on the other hand—all of this travel is teaching me
something about letting go of my expectations. I mean, what if someone told me,
“Today, someone you don’t know is going to pick you up around 2 p.m. in a
songtaew. Everything you do after 2 will be a surprise—nothing is planned. She
will not speak your language. Just go with the flow. Enjoy whatever surprises
she wants to throw at you. Laugh with your friends. Trust her.” If I’d heard
that, then maybe (apart from Marly’s lost wallet) everything would have felt a
little less, well… wrong.
I mean,
yeah, we were “off track.” But what was the problem with what we ended up doing
instead? We saw the sunset. We ate a pretty good dinner. We were safe and
together and fell asleep comfortably in something that was not a tent. Some of
these trips, really, I just need to learn how to let go of what I think I
“need” to see, and to let the momentum of the trip change course as it needs.
The next
morning essentially made up for the entire “disastrous” experience. She picked
us up outside of 7-11 at 7 a.m. We had our “typical” breakfast—corn flake
cereal with yogurt for me, egg ham and cheese “toastie” microwaveable
sandwiches for my friends—but regardless, she still handed us a large wicker
basket filled with steaming hot white rice. “Breakfast,” she said.
“Oh, uh,
no,” I stammered, pointing to our food. “We have breakfast.” She took the basket
back to the front seat. We felt slightly guilty for refusing to eat the meal
she’d prepared for us, but none of us could consider eating more rice just to satisfy her.
Then she
drove us to the beautiful 5-headed Buddha statue that my students had showed
me. And, honestly, it is better than the pictures. First of all, especially in
the coolness of early morning and with a light mist covering the fields, the
expansive landscape is breathtaking. It is truly just endlessly green fields
and light yellow cornfields and oddly shaped mountains and dark green trees—and
that’s it. No streets, no houses, no buildings, no smoke. And then the statue
itself is bigger than I can even conceptualize—the shortest Buddha head was at
least 30 feet above me. Then the floor below and around the Buddha statue is
exquisite—colorful gems and diamonds and stones. There is another nearby temple,
which is just as impressive, covered in bright gems and gold pieces. I’ll post
pictures, but really, it might not do it justice.
Then we
travelled home. I won’t complain too much, but let’s just say, it was it’s own
sweaty kind of hell: 8 hours on a bus, without a bathroom, and without food. It
took days to recover.
A few weeks
ago, Devon and I googled, “Beaches that are day trips from Bangkok.” We
scrolled through a list of them and landed on one: “a temple in a cave on a
beach.” This sounded fascinating, so we planned our trip.
I didn’t
even realize until arriving that this is the same place Jojo and Jordan (from The Bachelor…), spent one of their
dates. So, really, you could just watch that episode if you want to know what
my experience was like (minus the dating parts).
Travel was
easier, this weekend, and really, it was probably just luck that made it that
way. We took a 3 hour van to Pranburi, got off at a random bus station that
looked just as random and deserted as the one last weekend had looked
(resulting in slight PTSD for Devon and I), and then found ourselves a taxi and
showed him the address. “Oh, 20 minutes away,” the driver told us. Thank god.
My friend
Gabi (remember her from Nong Khai?) joined us, too. It was honestly a perfect
weekend, and the best part was that nothing was planned. We arrived at our
beautiful hostel. They told us we had an entire cottage to ourselves, with a
kitchen and a living room (pictures below). Yes, we were surprised with an
unexpected fourth roommate (a nice but absent Yoga-teaching woman), but we
couldn’t really complain. The place was empty
(why they needed to put us with a stranger, I’m not sure… there really
wasn’t a shortage of rooms). But, regardless, the emptiness meant that we were
truly VIP guests. They held a cocktail hour just for us three (not sure if it
would have happened regardless… we were the only guests), and brought us
2-for-1 drinks and dinner. Then, upon our request, they made multiple batches
of popcorn in their popcorn maker, and allowed us to plug our own iPod’s into
the speakers to listen to our own choice of music. On the second night, a
worker actually surprised us with free mojitos delivered to our room. This
hostel was truly fantastic.
The first
day, we took our free bicycles that the hostel provided us and began biking to
the “beach.” We quickly figured out that we could not sunbathe on this beach—it
was all rocks. Regardless, we weren’t really bothered. It was beautiful and
completely empty, besides a few fisherman and townspeople. It was as if the
entire ocean—the entire town—was ours.
We returned
to our hostel and requested a taxi to take us to the national park, figuring
there’d be more to do there. A songtaew arrived to drive us. We spent the
afternoon at the beach there. We had the option to hike to the cave with the
temple, but we wanted to save that for the following day since it cost money
and it was already 2 p.m. The beach was empty and it was overcast, but it was
beautiful. The ocean was light blue and clear, and mountains bordered us from
all sides. Besides a stray dog and a random couple, we were the only ones on
the sand. We pulled out a book I’d brought with me—Outliers—and my friend read it out loud. We spent our afternoon
like this—reading chapters out loud, pausing to discuss, pausing to drink
coconut and eat pineapple and mango, pausing to walk the beach, and then
reading again, discussing again.
We returned
for our cocktail hour, ate some chicken and pasta, and brought bowls of popcorn
back to our room for a movie.
The next
morning, we adventured back to the national park. There was a large sign. Beside
the Thai words, it said 40 baht. Beside the English words, it said 200.
“That’s
what they do,” Gaby explained to me. “They charge the foreigners more—a lot
more—because they can’t even read that it is so much cheaper for anyone from
Thailand.”
We refused
to fall for this, and we were ready to “fight” (our plan was to repeat, “we
teachers! Not foreigners!” in English until they got frustrated and took the
40). However, as we approached the ticket booth, we saw someone else was
already getting yelled at… so we just slipped by them and began hiking, for
free, courtesy of some very dumb luck.
The hike
was steep and long. It was mostly rock, with a concrete platform built beside
the natural rock as an option to use when passing people, although the concrete
made me more nervous because of how steep it felt. About two hours later, we
reached the opposite side of the mountain, with a beautiful white “sand” beach
(the sand, really, was just millions of tiny pieces of broken shell). The water
was clear, light blue, and refreshingly cool. Dark green trees separated the
beach from the woods behind it. It reminded me a bit of a
hybrid—Florida-beaches, perhaps, beside some Maine-woods.
We hiked
into the cave (VERY steep, long, and so tiring that we couldn’t really breathe
the entire way up). I got a few glances because of my outfit choice—are those knees? Finally, we descended into this
cave. It was incredible—and felt like an adult playground. There are holes at
the top of the cave to let light in, which means a lot of natural greenery growing
inside the cave. The temple, built by a Thai King (Rama V?), looked from the
entrance to the cave like it was glowing. There were little pitch-black
sections of the cave you could crouch and enter into, with small Buddha statues
and candles set up. There were hills in the cave made of reddish-brown dirt,
which, although slippery, we climbed up and down. Truly, it was a place you
could get lost inside, a place you could spend hours just circling and
exploring.
After a few
hours, we climbed out of the cave and back down to the beach. We were starving,
so we were actually grateful (for once!) for fried rice. Then, we SWAM
(December 11, 2016—I swam in an ocean! 14 days before Christmas). It was as refreshing as you could imagine, especially
after our sweaty, tiring hike. Then we lay on the beach for a while, before
climbing over the mountain in time to see sunrise. We took our motorbikes and
cruised around for a bit, down random dirt roads, pulling over every so often
to take pictures. And then we journeyed back to our hostel (where we watched The Bachelor episode… you know, to
compare). We ate dinner (FYI, burgers taste weird and different here—wouldn’t
necessarily recommend… but banana splits really taste the same anywhere),
returned our rented motorbikes (and almost got attacked by a crazed dog on the
way home, on our bicycles—I’ve never ridden a bike so fast in my life), and
went to bed.
The next
morning, we lay at the pool for a while and then began our long journey back to
Sakon Nakhon. We also found Burger King at the airport, and I felt an
excitement for food that I haven’t felt in forever.
This
weekend was wonderful. I was lucky, honestly, that I’d experienced the
disastrous-Petchabun weekend right before. By the time this weekend arrived, I
was well aware of exactly how vacations in Thailand might go. They might go like this: transportation takes
forever, no one speaks your language, Google lies to you, places you think you
want to see turn out to be unimpressive, and places you hadn’t planned on
seeing turn out to be your favorite. I mean, we didn’t do all that much this weekend—we found some fruit and some drinks,
we read a book together, we saw a temple in a cave, we swam at the beach. The
difference was simply that we didn’t start this weekend with a hard-and-fast
“to-do” list, so we didn’t feel any sense of guilt or regret for changing our
minds in the moment. Every minute, we asked ourselves, “Is this what we want to
be doing? Is this what we want to do?” We were flexible. And we gave ourselves
plenty of time to just read a book on the beach, or watch The Bachelor in our living room, without any of us saying out loud,
“Hang on a minute—didn’t Google say we could cliff dive and scuba dive and swim
with sharks and ride horses, only a few hours from here? Why are we staying
still? Why aren’t we moving?”
