Khao Yai

In Thailand a Buddhist national holiday happens to fall on Valentines day so we all got the day off school making it a long weekend. We took full advantage of this and ventured off in to the jungle.

On Friday morning Lindsey, Jess, Hanisha and I travelled a few hours north east out of Bangkok to Khao Yai National Park. We were picked up from the bus stop by a driver from our apartment. We stayed at Bobbies Apartment's which had a lovely friendly hostel feel to it and they were so welcoming. They also organised our one and a half day tour, so we headed straight off on the afternoon tour as soon as we got there. It was a relaxing afternoon stopping at a natural spring which we could swim in (although we felt rather naked in out bikini's compared to the Thai's swimming in t-shirts, oh well we are use to being stared at so no change!) The water was crystal clear and beautiful. The next stop was a Buddist Cave with a shrine in it where monks go to meditate. It was very random and we learnt a little bit from our tour guide about the monks which was interesting. the sun was then beginning to set so it was time to see the bats wake up from their sleep and fly out for the evening. Us girls were not overly excited to see the bats as we had already seen similar in Lopburi but this was something else there were millions and millions, I've never seen anything like it.

































That evening we chilled at the restaurant with people from our tour and who would be on our tour the next day. It was great chatting about everyone's past and future travel plans and getting to know people from countries all over the world.

The next day was an early start and after delicious pancakes we began the full day tour by driving in to the national park and stopping at a few view points along the way. This is where we saw are first signs of wildlife of a monkey high up munching on some fruit in a tree.

After stopping at the information centre and museum for a short time it was then time to start our trek into the jungle with our crazy, enthusiastic tour guide. He certainly made the day fantastic with his craziness and sense of humour. He found hornbills in the highest trees and tracked down several gibbons for us to see. He had an amazing telescope we could look through and he would take pictures through it as well. The gibbons were fascinating swinging from tree to tree and making the strangest of sounds. After several hours of trekking the jungle we circled round and came back to the pick up truck (our means of transport for the day, it did have seats in the back but meant we could see out at any point) for a bit of lunch.

In the afternoon we drove further in to the park and walked to see some beautiful waterfalls. The first one which we couldn't swim in features in the film "The Beach" where they jump off it. Our tour guide took us down a winding path off the beaten track to our own exclusive waterfall, where no one else was in sight. after a day full of walking in the sun it was blissful to cool off in the water.

It was then time to go in search of some wild elephants, there was only a small chance we would see them so we all anxiously peered out the truck in to the jungle hoping to get a glimpse. There were many tour groups on the same mission which was great as a few other trucks were stopped on the road watching one showing us he was there! It was hard to see through the think trees but every so often he poked his trunk out towards the road. Eventually when he thought the time was right and he found an exit he crossed the road to the other side. He was then in full sight for us to see. It was fantastic seeing a wild elephant so close up and in his own home. It was then time for us to head home. We quickly drove all the way to the top of the mountain to a view point. Unfortunately it was misty so there wasn't much to see but then headed back to the apartments for dinner and an early night as we were so exhausted from the jam packed but awesome day.

The next day I got up early and headed back to Bangkok as my cousin, Emily and her friend Lou were in town. I took them to explore JJ market and have some street food near my place. It was great catching up with them after their month round Asia and to hear all their travel stories. Next time we will be reunited is in Singapore in March, can't wait for the adventures to continue.

With love from Thailand xxx

How many accidents can we get in to one weekend?

It's Dave's birthday so a few of us (Dave, Tom, Faye, Hanisha and Lindsey) decide to head off to an Island a few hours south of Bangkok for the weekend. We arrived on Koh Sichang at about 11am on Saturday after an early start from Bangkok. The island is beautiful and tiny. It only took about ten minutes from one end to the other on a moped.

After settling in to our accommodation, of which was delightful as we had mini bungalows compared to the normal hostels we stay in, we went off to explore the island on the mopeds. At this point Hanisha and Lindsey are yet to arrive, so its just Tom and I on one moped and Dave and Faye on the other, the boys taking control with the driving while us girls just admired the view. And what a view it was......

We made are way across the island to a small beach, there were very few foreigners to be seen and those which were visiting were a little bit older than us, so we did attract some attention with our white skin (well myself and Dave's skin). For the majority of the day we sunbathed and chilled on the beach, the other girls then joined us later. We had a lot of fun going on a banana boat and being thrown in to sea head first hundreds of times. I lost count the amount of times Faye and I nearly lost our bikinis and gave the locals even more to stare at!

At about 5.30 we decided to head from the beach to a view point to watch the sunset. With three on each moped and the boys still driving we thought there would be no problem. The amount of times I've seen a whole Thai family, the dog and the months shopping on a moped it no longer surprises me. But maybe us English folk don't quite have the same balance.....Dave takes the first uphill corner with a little too much speed and with two unstable girls on the back topples over in front of a Thai audience. Don't worry mum, I chose wisely and went on Tom's bike with Lindsey all safe and sound! We rushed back to help them to find them a little shaken with a few cuts and bruises but no need for a trip to the hospital. A lucky escape.

Once the shaking from the accident had stopped we decided the evenings antics must go on!! About 4 drinks in to Dave's 24 drink challenge of the night we headed off to "Pan and David's" restaurant, recommended by a website, for a meal and more drinks the Thai way (order a bottle of alcohol and mixes) I'm not sure how to write about the whole evening.....but lets just say the effects of alcohol started to kick in and a hilarious evening unfolded. There were incidents involving cheesecake, limes and northern banter along with dancing at a Thai family gathering and being sung happy birthday too. When us girls, the slightly more sober ones of the group thought it was best we leave the restaurant we headed back to the bungalows to attempt some drinking games. Tom and my self's drunken attempt at teaching the others a game of flip cup was awful but not nearly as bad as Tom on his own trying to teach us a card game. Which he failed epically at even after looking the rules up online!

I think we lost count of how many drinks Tom and the Birthday boy managed to complete in their challenge but after reaching about 15 we all called it a night, the next day there were a few sore heads among the group. Therefore we decided to take it easy and didn't have breakfast till about 12, and then wandered down to one of the piers before we had to head home. Of course we can't forget the stop at 7/11 for some souvenirs....

We were all commenting on how it was lucky only a few of us had injuries from the weekend when I decided to adventure down some steps on the pier and slipped landing with a thud on my arse!! It was like something out of a cartoon so I was laughing hysterically and was gutted to find no one saw me slip so didn't join me in the moment, but just helped me up. That's 4 out of 6 with war wounds....oh wait make that 5. Moments later Tom was feeling hot so jumped off the pier in to the sea to cool down, while climbing back up he scraped his legs and elbow on the rocks. Just Lindsey survived!!

After an epic journey home and finding it nearly impossible to get a mini bus back to Bangkok we made it.

Remember how I said Lindsey didn't get hurt......we receive a message on Monday morning saying she's got a swollen eye like she had been punched. She has no idea how it happened!

With Love from Thailand xxx

P.s I promise to stay safe this weekend

An English Teacher in Thailand

Being in Thailand and teaching is a very different experience from visiting as a foreigner. So I thought I would write this post to give you a better idea of what it’s really like to live here and get to know Thai students and other Thai teachers. All the stories below are from either myself or other teachers out here that I have met through my TEFL course or at work. Some are funny, some maybe not, but hopefully it will give you more of an insight in to the Thai life.

-         Teacher asks P5 students to name as many items of clothing as possible, getting towards the end and one shouts out G-String.

-         Thai Teacher says to English Teacher- “teacher has small Nom Nom” (nom nom in Thai is boobs) They don't hold back.

-         Teacher asks a Secondary school student to carry all the work books for him, it isn’t until he’s half way down the stairs that he realises he has a club foot and is struggling.

-         Practicing directions by using a game similar to pin the tail on the donkey. One boy and one girl volunteer blindfolded. The other students are directing in English and the teacher realises after a while they are not directing them to the board but in to each other. Then just lets it happen.

-         All Thai kids get called by a nick name chosen by their parents rather than their full long Thai name. However some of them are very random. In my classes I have an Elle, Sarah, Mark and Eve alongside a Pooh, Petch, Brown, Porn, Pun-pun, Poogun and Game.

-         English Teacher says to another English Teacher “Oh I like your skirt” Reply – “I’m not wearing it again I got called sexy today.” “Oh I see.” Being called Sexy Teacher is not a complement it’s a way of Thais saying it is not appropriate for school.

-         English Teacher walks out of the staff room on third floor and 3 students on a push bike ride past, at least they had helmets on!

-          Kindergarten kids playing a game where they chant the vocab word and take a step forward until the teacher changes the flashcard and they all run away as the teacher chases them. Two kids collide and one ends up with a bleeding nose. Home room teacher cleans the boy up and he’s back playing in ten mins, no accident book for the teacher to fill out, all will be fine or as the Thai's say Mai Pen Rai.

-        English Teacher uses a puppet to introduce vocab but scares a kindergarten kid so much she pees on the floor.

-         While doing swimming lesson little nursery boy goes to the bathroom, English teacher goes to find him, He’s done a big shit. Teacher bum guns (this is the water gun next to every toilet that you can use to clean yourself) him down and shoves him back in the pool.

-          Telling a child to “say it in English” and they reply with “say it in English”

-          A student tells an teacher to F**k off, he is taken to the principle who smacks him and tells him off. Then next day the student comes in with his parents, his parents are not happy as the principle smacked him. The principle tells the parents what happened and then the father smacks the kid.

To be continued…..

A Day with the Elephants and so much more!

After a delightful trip to Bali, Sophie and I headed much further north in the world to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand for the build up to New Year. There we met some of my friends from the TEFL course. Because we got a bus ten hours overnight we had a quick nap in the hostel before heading off for the day exploring the city. The hostel we stayed in was amazing, Deejai Backpackers, it had such a lovely, friendly laid back feel to it. There was also an adorable outdoor area, with a campfire, tree house, bar and pool. It was so great I've decided to stay there again when I visit for Songkran in April.

Tom, Jess, Hanisha, Sophie and I hired bikes for the afternoon to adventure around the city. The majority of us were confident riding around on the Thai roads with cars and mopeds wizzing past us. But if you talk to others in the party they may disagree that it was a lovely peaceful afternoon riding around. We passed and stopped off at different beautiful temples and markets before finding a bar to recover in and have a cider (which was delightful as cider is hard to find out here). In the evening we found a cute restaurant for dinner and then had a few drinks round the camp fire.

The next day was Jess' birthday and what a day it was. We wanted to do something very special for her day so we organised a day at the Elephant Nature Park. We all love elephants but not nearly as much as Jess so it was the perfect birthday present for her. Well I hope it was, I think her constant smile throughout the day showed us it was. Having said that we were all smiling the whole day. The elephants were adorable. I had very mixed views about elephant care before coming to Thailand and what was right and wrong and what hurt them and what didn't, but this place certainly told me more than enough about the right way they should be treated. Please check out their website and go visit if you can http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/

Throughout the day we got to feed them bananas and watermelon, walk around the park and explore their home. None of the elephants are tired up or ridden, they each have a Mahout that looks after them and with positive reinforcement keeps them in check, especially the young boy elephants who can be a little naughty. We learnt about there individual stories and where they had come from, some of which were so sad, but so lovely they had now been rescued. The day finished by giving them a wash in the river and splashing them with buckets of water.

That night after a trip to the night market, where I spent too much money on souvenirs, we put on our glad rags and headed out for Jess' birthday. We danced the night away at Zoe's in the Yellow. Zoe's is a cool cluster of bars and dance floors playing music from Thai reggae to main stream chart music, there was something for everyone!

After the night out and a little too much to drink the next day ended up being a very chilled lazy day, we wondered down the street, found a Thai massage by blind people and snoozed by the tree house. That evening we had the pleasure of being reunited with our Thai trainer Rungwit from Koh Samui who lives in Chiang Mai with his wife (Nadine who also works for TEFL Heaven so a lot of us knew her from emails) and their adorable son Ollie. Rungwit put on a lovely BBQ and we all chatted and caught up with the gossip within the TEFL family.

The next day was mine and Sophie's last day in Chiang Mai before our flight back to Bangkok. In the morning with Hanisha we ventured up the mountain to Doi Suthep a beautiful temple on the top and to "find the beauty". As per usual the Thai temple didn't let us down in how magnificent it was, Unfortunately the view from the top overlooking the city was unseen due to it being misty. Nevertheless the trip up the mountain was worth it.

Back in Bangkok, Sophie and I bought in the New Year from my balcony and watched as the city came alive with fireworks. We filled New Years Day with a whistle stop tour of the sites of Bangkok for Sophie to experience before her flight back to Jakarta.


With Love from Thailand xxx

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