Advertisement
Published: December 28th 2009
Edit Blog Post
December tends to be a pretty packed month, even without Christmas break. We have midterms, a Christmas play which is taking FAR too long, grading and not enough time to get all the lessons taught. I have treasured my weekends where I could explore the area. Last weekend we took a day trip to a cave called Rap Ro. Two other teachers in my program, Danni and Paul rented a motorbike and Angel hopped on the back of mine.
We set out. Angel, having crashed one motorbike already, was palpably tense and I was suddenly worried that his angst alone would land us both on the pavement. Driving out of town, we stopped in a few locations to ask directions. I found that I was a touch delighted to be the only one in the group to speak any Thai. As no one knew better they were all very impressed with my ability to say “Where is Rap Ro?” In Thai. Though everyone seemed to know exactly what we were talking about at least two out of the four people we asked gave us completely incorrect and contradictory directions. This led us tracing a large L shape several times until
an ancient Thai man hopped on a motorbike and led us their himself. We then realized were right to begin with but had made the mistake of asking directions to be sure.
When we finally arrived we gave merit to the statue of the Buddha and gave our 20 baht each. We then went to explore the complex. We found 3 monkeys tethered to a few trees. Ohhing and awing we took pictures and smiled until one particularly menacing monkey sized me up and made a rush for me. I jumped back 10 paces in half a second as the monkey rushed me and barred his teeth revealing a red mouth with lots of teeth. He hissed, I screamed, the Thai’s laughed.
“What the hell, the monkey tried to kill me!” I whined. I was not amused, everyone else was. After that, I stayed away from the monkeys. A monk appeared soon thereafter to lead us up to the caves. He mentioned that we were all supposed to contribute another 100 baht as a lantern fee. We shrugged, knowing that it was purely because we were Farang and contributed the extra money to their cause. Angel grumpily slipped
in 20 baht more being one of the many who are pretty affronted that the Thai’s consistently discriminate against anyone who is not Thai by charging considerably more.
As the Monk led us through the gorgeous old caves we explored ancient Buddhist statues and the deep enclaves of the 7 linking caves. The Monk was amusing, chatty and seemingly not very traditional. Climbing in and out of caves the Monk consistently helped me up and down grabbing my arm or hand to do so. I have been confused on a number of occasions by the Monks caviler attitude about the tradition that they are not actually supposed to touch or even talk to women directly. At one point our Monk guide put his hand on my head to make sure I didn’t hit it. It is usually not considered ok to touch anyone’s head, as the highest part of the body this is considered sacred. At another point he actually delivered a full on ass pat as he helped me down from a not so steep step. Still I liked our frisky Monk and got some great pictures of him in that cave.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.083s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 6; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0506s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb