A Bizzare Christmas in Bali

Bali – Christmas – 22-27^th

In Thailand Christmas is not widely celebrated as it is a Buddhist country, however unlike a lot of my teacher friends I managed to get a week or so off over Christmas. I decided to go away to the island of Bali in Indonesia and meet my friend from home Sophie who is also teaching in Jakarta.

We arrived on the island of paradise to pouring rain, and it did not stop raining for three days. This put a drastic stop to our plans of lying on the beach for the week. We spent the first few days just chilling and doing a bit of shopping and squeezing in a lovely relaxing Balinese massage.

Christmas Eve

It was still raining when we woke up on the eve of Christmas so we decided to embrace the weather and take a trip out for the day. We hired a driver who took us to various attractions on the way to Udon a town inland on the island. These attractions included a Hindu temple, some rice fields and a coffee plantation.

Each were beautiful in their own right, but my favourite stop was the coffee plantation. Our tour guide showed us how the coffee was produced at this particular plantation. An Indonesian cat called a Luwak eats the good coffee beans in their shells. They don’t digest them but poo them out, the beans are collected cleaned off and removed from the shells. These are then roasted and ground down in to what we know as coffee. We then sat on a beautiful terrace overlooking the rice fields on the edge of a mountain and tasted the “poo coffee” along with lots of other flavours such as ginger, vanilla and chocolate.

  

After tasting the surprisingly delicious “poo coffee” we ventured off to the small town of Udon to find some lunch and do a bit of market shopping. For lunch we had an Indonesian dish called Soto Ayam which is like a chicken noodle soup, it was very tasty. It was nice to try different food, as the area we were staying in was very tourist it was hard to find Asian food.  Another yummy Indonesian meal is Padang, you have a portion of rice and then lots of added extras like spicy veg and this delicious pork marinated in yummy spices I also tried catfish for the first time (bit bland I wouldn't recommend it)

That evening we put on our party dress and wondered off to a bar which had free drinks for travellers from 9-10 so we took full advantage of this, maybe a bit too much of advantages as we woke up on Christmas day with a slight hangover.

Christmas Day

Waking up to glorious sunshine (yes it had stopped raining) on Christmas day was very bizarre. It did not feel like Christmas at all in 28 degree heat and not being with family or heading off to church and then returning for turkey and champagne. But Sophie and I had each other to get us through. We opened a few presents (no stocking with an orange in the bottom this year) and then headed off to meet some of Sophie’s friends at a bar on the beach nearby. After a dip in the sea, a nap on the beach and some yummy food at the bar we headed back to our hostel (guesthouse) to skype the family after seeing the most beautiful sunset ever!

Boxing Day

This sun was still shining!!!!!! It was our last full day in Bali so we headed down towards the beach and found a glorious pool to sunbathe by. We read our books, napped and took a dip in the pool until our stomachs decided it was time to find some food. As it was our last day we treated ourselves to the Hard Rock Café it was very filling but delicious.

We then had an evening of entertainment. We headed south to a temple and cliff to watch a traditional Balinese play while the sun set in the background. The dance/play was interesting to say the least but the costumes and dancing was incredible it was mesmerising and bizarre to watch. The perfect end to the first part of our holiday.

With Love from Thailand xxx

Katie's Surprise!

On Thursday 5^th of December it was the Kings birthday meaning a national holiday. This meant on Wednesday we could celebrate! People from Speak EZ joined with a few added friends from my TEFL course went for dinner followed by a few (too many) drinks, making a fun random night ending back at our apartment (four of us that work together all live in the same apartment block) playing drinking games to the early hours. It was then decided in our hung over state the next day that we would go and surprise our friend Katie in Mukdahan for the weekend.

On Friday Jess, Tom and I got on a bus to travel overnight 10 hours north-east to the town of Mukdahan near the border with Laos. We arrived at about 6.30am which meant we got to spend the whole day being shown round the town. It was so nice to get out of Bangkok and see where Katie had settled and was making a very different yet very exciting new way of life. She is one of very few foreigners living there so we were stared at the whole weekend, attracting lots of attention. There are no taxis or motor bike taxis unlike the capital but everything was close enough to walk too. It was a lot cooler up north that I actually wanted to wear a jacket for the first time since being here. Katie has also had the opportunity to make Thai friends and see so much more of the culture here and the Thai way of living – there’s no McDonald’s in site!

Laos in the background

Katie showed us the huge murky river which is the border between Thailand and Laos, my first view of Laos which I will be sure to visit when I start travelling. After breakfast we wondered round a market before finding a quite lunch spot looking over the river. The afternoon was very chilled and we discovered a temple full of monkeys. However these monkeys were slightly different to the ones in Lopburi at the festival, they were little scarier and slightly aggressive. We had no food to give them so before being attacked made a quick exit!

 

 

That evening we went to a local bar for some drinks the Thai way – order a bottle of whisky and mixers and drink away. We were the only white people in the whole bar so created a lot of attention. We then created even more attention when we moved on to a Thai Club. This was a whole other experience. With lady boys to our right, Thai men saying how beautiful we were (Tom included!) to our right (because of our white skin) and a stage full of Thai girls only wearing their underwear at the front. A few songs were western, a few Thai (which we knew from hearing them out here) and a few we had never heard but still had a good dance. You know you’re the minority when you go to order drinks at the bar, they ask where your sat, you respond with “the Falangs over there” and they know exactly where to take the drinks. Falang is the word Thai use for foreigners.

We woke up the next day after sleeping in to go to one of the local hotels to use the pool and sunbathe before having to say goodbye to Katie and catch the overnight bus back to Bangkok. We arrived back at 6am in time to get to work to start the next week. Luckily Tuesday was another public holiday so we could catch up on sleep.

 With Love from Thailand xxx

Ayutthaya

Ayutthaya is a town about an hour north of Bangkok it used to be the old capital of Siam (This is what Thailand use to be called) from 1350 to 1767. 33 different Kings ruled during the 417 years it was the capital until 1767 when the Burmese Army invaded and looted the city. They destroyed the capital by burning down the temples and removing the heads of the Buddha statues. They stole many of the treasure’s which have never been found and the remaining are now in museums in Ayutthaya. Now what remains of the historical site is protected on UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites.

Jess had a friend visiting for the weekend, who also happens to be called Jess, so the two Jessica’s and I travelled to Ayutthaya on the Saturday. We checked in to a cute hostel, where we could hire bicycles for the day to explore. After a quick bite to eat for lunch we cycled around taking in the ancient ruins. They were very peaceful despite the number of fellow tourist mingling around.

After cycling between all the temples and nearly crashing in to the elephants wondering the streets with tourist riding on them we headed back to the hostel. That evening we went on a boat trip around the Island. Ayutthaya has been made in to an Island by a river splitting and going either side of the land. It was a night so all the temples along the riverside were beautifully lit up. With just the three of us in a little thin long-tail boat with our Thai driver, it was very tranquil motoring along the murky water, with our eyes peeled for crocodiles. We got dropped off at a quite night market, which was a must see in the guide book but ended up being very small and closed early, but we ate dinner and then headed back to chill at the hostel.

Another must in the guide book was the floating market so after a lazy morning we headed there for lunch. However it turned out to not be that traditional but more of a tourist attraction of how a Thai market would be perceived. Having said that it was still fun and full interesting stalls.

We had ticked off everything on our Ayutthaya list so it was time to head back to busy Bangkok, and get stuck in traffic for hours because of the political protests going on.

 With Love from Thailand xxx