We made it safely to Bangkok Thailand on February 1st. We cannot say the same about our bags. We picked an unfortunate time to travel to asia (the Chinese New Year). This meant that nobody was working in the Singapore Airport where our bags were and we could not get them back for nearly a week. And to add to the issue, someone had stolen a number of things out of them including our iPods that had all picture we took of Australia and New Zealand. So that was week 1, hanging out in Bangkok calling the airport and airline over and over.
When we did finally get our bags we were in a hurry to get out of Bangkok so we headed to Kanchanaburi which is the location of the "Bridge on the River Kwai". However, it is not the actual location that the movie was filmed at. While in Kanchanaburi we did a couple of animal related activities which include visiting a school where they take abandon monkeys and teach them to pick coconuts. The average human can pick about 200 coconuts in a day but these monkeys can pick up to 800 to 1000 in one day. They also train them to ride bicycles, play basketball, and attack unsuspecting tourists as soon as they walk through the gate. They are very agile and it is difficult to keep them from taking things from your pockets. Then on our way back from monkey school we saw a man with a tiger chained to a table and we couldnt resist the urge to pay 3 dollars to feed it milk.
Next we went to Ayutthaya which is the old capital city of Thailand. There are many, many old temples and ancient ruins. Most had been destroyed by the Burmese many decades ago, but it was neat still to go and see the remants of the old city. There were some hidden temples in the ruins and buddha statues everywhere. We saw what has to be the biggest buddha in the world, but we don't know. It was at least 40 feet high with gold plating. We also saw a massive sleeping Buddha statue which was about 100 feet long. We also rode an elephant. We were told it was good luck and we figured we could use all the luck we could get.
After we went north to Chiang Mai. 10 hours overnight on the train. It is much less busy than Bangkok but still a lot going on. We saw a few more temples here and went to the massive night market that they have every Sunday. We went up into the hills just outside of the city and went to a refuge village with people from all the different hill tribes. There they made crafts and farm in a self sustaining village where tourist can come and learn about their history and life style. Here we saw the long neck woman from Burma. They are the women who have gold looking rings around there neck that they start putting on the woman when they are 4-6 yrs old. Their necks don't really stretch out, it actually pushes down on their collarbone and shoulders. They weave scarfs and hang out with tourist all day, but that is better than their previous lifestyle in Burma, now called Myanmar.
We are now in a little hippie village called Pai which is 3 hours (and 768 curves) north west of Chiang Mai. Here we rented a scooter for 2 and a half days. We went to see a couple of waterfalls, a huge canyon, and on a few sunset drives. Occasionally we will see people walking their elephants down the road. We have spent most of our time in Pai just relaxing.
Next we are going to Laos on a three day 2 night excursion via bus, another bus, a ferry, and then 2 days on a slow boat down a river. The end
