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Published: February 26th 2011
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So today we got an early start when we were picked up for our elephant trek, a one hour hike to a waterfall, river rafting and visit to the Kaka (sp?) people.
The first stop was a people group that originally came from Tibet. There are about 150 of them in Thailand in this village. They do not speak Thai and live in a pretty primitive area. The condition for them in the past few years has improved because the King of Thailand (Long Live The King) now subsidizes their existence a bit. The people mainly work in the rice fields and do other manual labor. A couple interesting facts are that they are Catholic in a nation of 90% Buddhists. The other interesting fact is that they eat dog in the winter. Only black dogs, so Melanie was locking for a black lab to rescue. Didn’t see any so maybe it was a long cold winter, who knows.
Speaking of the king earlier, the Thai people LOVE their king by the way. There are pictures of the royal family everywhere and in every house. You can actually be arrested for speaking poorly of the royal family.
The
next stop was the elephant trek. Now, after we finished the trek we heard about a Swiss lady that was killed in southern Thailand on the same day when an elephant got in a fight with another male elephant and ended up crushing and trampling the lady. Luckily we had nice elephants. Since we could only have three on one elephant, one person had to ride on the neck. Since Melanie loves animals so much, she was quick to volunteer. If you ask her today, I am pretty sure she regrets her decision and she has real sore abs and thighs from trying to hold on, plus she got poked by the elephants coarse hair. Kind of funny to me. They made us a nice lunch of fried rice and watermelon after our 1 hour trek.
We then made our 1 hour trek through the jungle to a real nice waterfall. It was a welcome relief after the hot humid hike. You will see that they pretty much do everything including washing their dishes in the water. Up in northern Thailand there is a lot of agriculture. We saw mangoes, strawberries, garlic and a lot of rice to name
a few.
After the jungle hike we went white water rafting and then a short bamboo raft ride down the river. No pictures of that since we could not take our cameras. We ended up getting back in time to head out for some street food and late night shopping.
The thing I like most about traveling is all the different people you meet along the way. They have a saying over here that you may have heard, “same same but different”. It is the different about others that you can never know unless you get out among different people groups. We have met so many, obviously Thais, but we have also interacted with Malaysians, Germans, Dutch, English, Japanese, Chinese, Finish, Canadians and even a random few Americans. We try and avoid the Americans.
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