2/12/2002 - New Years Edition

Lest you have forgotten our email last year, or if you’re one of the new folks who only recently has been added to the list (Hi there!), Thailand takes almost any excuse for a party, and New Year’s is but one example. We’re little more than a month and a half past the New Year’s that we all know and love, which Thai’s celebrate with vigor (perhaps more vigor than we personally like), and we are fast approaching the Chinese New Year’s (either the 8th, the 11th or the 13th depending on who you ask), which Thais will also celebrate. We’re still a couple of months from the Thai New Year in April, which, naturally, is THE celebration to top all celebrations. So, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As happened to us last fall, we have let several months pass without an update, so we apologize. In this New Year’s Edition, we’ll fill you in on all the fun traveling we’ve done in the last couple of months, most of which happened while Denny’s parents were visiting us for 3 weeks. It was wonderful to look at Thailand again and see new things (You mean water buffalo and elephants don’t just walk down the road in America? How easily we forget…). Here is Denny’s Mom’s list of the first 10 things she noticed in Thailand:

The language, the skin color, the rice fields, the humidity you can see (that she thought was smog), the traffic, the shower heaters rather than central heating, the tile floors [instead of carpeting], the recessed bathrooms [watch your step], the currency [baht], and the smells/scents.

Denny’s parents arrival was uneventful, aside from the bickering Denny had to do with the cab driver to make sure that he did not rip us off. Denny & Lisa have been very accustomed to living on their Peace Corps budget (some people think we’re cheap . . . uh, thrifty . . . on any budget, but we digress) and it was eye opening to be traveling with someone on an “American” budget. In conversation with Thai people here we constantly have to remind them that Americans IN America are not necessarily all that rich because it’s so much more expensive to live in America. But when Americans come here – wow, that’s a different story. We are so accustomed to spending 20 baht (45 cents) for a meal that the idea of spending 80 baht ($1.70) in a tourist area was a difficult adjustment.

Denny’s parents arrived the week before Christmas and we stayed in Bangkok for a couple of days to let them recover from the 20 hour flight, and then we headed off to Kanchanaburi. As you may remember, we’ve been there a couple of times before – it’s the site of the bridge over the River Kwai. We spent a couple days touring before heading back to our site in Surin.

We spent the week of Christmas here in Sangka visiting schools and other sites here in Surin. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity of having 4 real live Americans in town, several of Lisa’s teachers organized classroom Christmas parties to which we were all invited. (We noticed that a Christmas tree belonging to one teacher attended all three parties as well). As you can see, we had or own enormous Christmas tree! Hint: it’s by Lisa’s elbow if you’re having trouble spotting it. A highlight of our time here in Surin was our day trip to the Surin Elephant Village and then to a village famous for its handmade silver beaded jewelry and hand-woven silk. We were chauffeured by Mr. Rachen, who is one of the teachers that Lisa works with and who conveniently (for us) owns a van. He speaks very little English, but was very interested in communicating with Denny’s parents, and the effort that he put forth was wonderful – the folks really appreciated it. Surin, as we wrote last time, is famous for elephants, and especially for the Elephant Festival in November. There is one village in particular where most of the Surin elephants live and are trained. Unfortunately, on the day that Mr. Rachen took us there, all but 2 of the elephants were in other parts of the country giving small shows and walking the streets of Bangkok or some other city where the trainers can find people who will pay money to feed the elephants. So we didn’t get to see the weekly show at the village, but Denny’s mom did get to ride an elephant, and we had a great day with Mr. Rachen and his family. Oh, and how could we forget: we got to pet the elephant that is in the Beer Chang commercials (the Thai version of getting to pet a Budweiser Clydesdale).

Note 4/2003: The elephants AWOL in Surin is a fairly continuous issue here in Thailand. A couple of decades ago there were elephants both wild in the forest and in the care of people. The ones in the care of people were primarily employed hauling logs out of the forrests - thus limiting the terrain of their wild friends, but giving more farmland to the poor farmers of Thailand. A few years back there was a big landslide here partially resulting from a logged hillside, and the government response was to ban all logging in Thailand. Nice for the forest critters and the hillsides, but unilaterally unemploying all of the domesticated elephants in Thailand. Now elephants primarily work for tourists, but there is a remarkable excess in supply, especially someplace like Surin with a lot of elephants but no tourist destinations. The elephants go to the cities so their owners can find money to feed them. The cities feel that the elephants are a traffic hazard and an eyesore, so they are trying to buy off the elephant owners and send elephants away from the cities. Unfortunately there are several problems here too - the elephant owners have often grown up with (and are occasionally outlived by) their elephants and are attached to them, the proposed replacement work for the elephants (border patrol with Burma) is OK for the elephants from Northern Thailand but not so good for Surin elephants and it will also have limited demand issues like tourism, and above all the elephants on the streets are not on welfare but buying them off and sending them elsewhere makes them a burden on the taxpayers. Not an easy situation.

After a week in Surin, we went to Ko Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. Trying to accommodate Denny’s mom’s need for minimal travel hassle (she’d had back trouble, so 12 hour bus rides were out of the question) and dealing with last minute travel arrangements during the busy season, we flew to nearby Surat Thani on the mainland, and then took a 2-hour bus to the ferry terminal, and then hopped onto the boat to get to the island. The hassle of multiple forms of transportation was too much for Denny’s folks, so we changed our plans and extended our stay on the island by a couple of days in order to be able to fly directly from the island itself (for which they kindly charged us an extra 400 Baht per person just because the airport was privately owned by Bangkok Airways, which just about sent Denny & Lisa into shock). It turned out that it was a wonderful idea to stay a little longer. Ko Samui itself was okay – nice beaches and lots of shopping – but not astounding, especially for a family of snorkeling fans. We scheduled a trip to Ko Tao – another island a couple of hours north by boat – to go snorkeling, but the seas were too rough the first day we were scheduled to travel and the pilot decided to turn back with a unanimous consenting vote from the passengers. Our previous change in travel plans allowed us to reschedule the trip for couple of days later, so we did get out to Ko Tao and got a chance to do some good snorkeling.

Our first snorkeling spot is pictured here – lots of fish, but also lots of people (hey, we’re in Thailand!). If we travel back to this group of islands again, we will stay on Ko Tao and skip Ko Samui – shopping opportunities do not make up for lost snorkeling opportunities.

After a week on the beach in the south, we headed North to Chiang Mai, where we shopped the night market, toured Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai (including beautiful gardens at the home of the King’s late mother), and managed to see an elephant show after all. Since this elephant show was in the mountains (ok, hills) around Chiang Mai instead of the plains of Surin, the elephants did not play soccer as they do in Surin, but they did play around a lot. The elephants seemed to be happy – enjoying their bath time, playing harmonicas, painting, playing around with the hats on their trainers’ heads. (For those of you interested, we do have a photo of the paintings the elephants did, and we will email it to you upon request. One elephant was definitely from the pointillism school while the other showed clear inspiration from the works of Henri Matisse.) Overall, we were impressed with the elephant camp, and it appeared that the elephants were very well taken care of.

Lisa and Linda made a quick trip back to Surin on the way from Chiang Mai to Bangkok (although if you look at a map, Surin is nowhere close to being “on the way”), then headed to the airport so Dan and Linda could fly back home to Alaska. They came to Thailand with 2 large suitcases, plus carry-ons, and left with 3 large suitcases, the same carry –ons, plus an additional one. If the success of a trip is measured in how much stuff you take home, they did very well!

Hope all is well with you.

Denny & Lisa