Floating Market

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Geo: 12.8, 99.9667

Got up early this morning and had a swim before breakfast. We were the first people there but some Thai's came in later to do their laps. We sat right next to the railing at breakfast meaning the road was only a few meters away. All of a sudden we saw 4 people run out towards the road with chairs and plastic bags, we thought they must've been crossing the road to the beach or something but no, they stopped and put their chairs down right next to the road. The next thing we know all these Monks are coming in a single file. At the chairs they stopped and held out their begging buckets, the people put their food in and off they went. Two minutes later we heard someone talking on a loudspeaker, we looked up and there was another row of monks begging for food followed by a truck with someone in the front talking and the back was for them all to sit in. It was the weirdest and most unexpected thing ever.

Nana had some postcards to post and she needed stamps for others so we worked out on the map how far to the post office and then all headed down. We agreed that it was 700m away so mum and I hired bikes, then rode off. We rode over a kilometre before turning around and heading back to them because we couldn't find it. When we got to them we got off the bikes and walked a little way before sending Pa off to look, Nana to go into a photo shop for something(not sure what) and mum and I just kept riding. It was really busy as they have a jet-ski competition on; meaning the footpath was now full of little markets, the beach was full of cars and a temporary grand-stand and the road was chaos, then there was us riding our little bikes trying to find a post office and not be killed, oh and we had no helmets either. We never found it so decided to turn around and go back then 200m from the hotel next to the shop where I got my glasses last time we found it.

At 2pm we went down to Mr Long's shop as we were going to go to the Floating Night market, the fireflies and 2 temples. Elvis - Nana and Pa's favourite driver, drove us and said he was taking us on the shortcut, well I'm not too sure about that. I would've called it the scenic route. Two and a half hours later we arrived at the floating market. But it was a nice trip, we passed through little villages, rice paddies and salt fields, lots and lots of salt fields. Nana says at least 30km and we were driving through them for an hour or more. It looked like it was about to rain so there were heaps of workers at one shed bagging all the salt up and loading it on to trucks, other piles of salt were covered in plastic and some had nothing to protect it. The sheds were 5x20m and there would've been 50++. In one of the villages there was a temporary bridge that would've only been 4m but it was made out of tree branches and wood. It was horrible and very scary and we had to drive over it.

We got to the floating market at 4.40 and walked through another market to get to the start of the floating market. 'So what's a floating market you ask' Well it's meant to be a market where the stalls are on long-tail boats and when you want something you just call them over and get what you want. But this one was just a market with a river in the middle and one or two boats going down it, but there's been no rain so it's very low and hard to get to the boats. On the side furtherest away from the river there are shops, you have to be really careful not to fall in the river as there's no railing or anything stopping you and trust me you wouldn't want to fall in that.

After the floating market we went to - well we had no idea where. It was meant to be the fireflies but that wasn't that far away. Mum said to me ' I hope he's going to the fireflies' so I asked Elvis how long to the fireflies and he mumbled something but we weren't quite sure what so mum asked something similar and again he mumbled so we had no idea where we were going. We turned off onto a road so it was looking good, we all got our hopes up again. We stopped on the road to look at 100 million bat cave then kept going, turns out we were only going to the Big Monk. - biggest in South Thailand. The monk had the biggest ears I've ever seen - it was so funny. A proper monk then opened up the monastery for us to look in, it was beautiful, around the outside it was full of statues and on the inside the walls and roof were painted and there was a statue with mosaic tiles. This monastery was 6 months old and took 10 years to build. It was replacing another across the road that was over 200 years old! This one was only built by monks.

The trip back only took 20 minutes and we then went and had dinner at Baan Thai, Nana and Pa have made friends with the owner Took-Ta. The dinner was very nice and halfway through we got the text from Uncle Andy saying that Collingwood had won so we were very happy about that. After tea we went back to the room and caught the last 8 seconds of the Collingwood match. I was very happy about that!

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Comments

[joan 34]

Sorry about the fireflies, but at least you saw them in Malaysia