Jarrod and Sara’s Site

 What’s up everyone? We just heard it snowed back home, sorry about that. It is weird to be here in December, this weather definitely doesn’t make you think about Christmas (although some stores play the music), but I think we will try to enjoy the nice weather anyway…

A few days ago, we finally got away from the city and went to Erawan National Park. This place was beautiful. The main attraction was a two mile hike up this well established trail that passed seven different waterfalls on the same stream. The falls were amazing and a few of them had good swimming holes. Hopefully the pictures will do them some justice. Aside from the falls themselves, the highlight for us was walking up to a bridge about half way up the trail to see a group of tourists gawking at the trees hanging over the stream. As we got closer, we saw that there was a huge group of monkeys playing in the trees, some of which were within arms reach of the bridge we were on. These monkeys were definitely not afraid of humans (as its a pretty popular spot for thai tourists) and a couple jumped on to the railing of the bridge and were running around staring at the tourists. For some reason, a young (20’s) European girl thought that it might be fun to try and pet one of the very small monkeys sitting on the railing in front of us. We looked on in disbelief as she slowly reached out her hand to pet the monkey (who looked back at her as if to say, “Are you kidding me?”). All of a sudden a bigger monkey jumped to a branch directly over her head and reached out and grabbed her by the hair and shook her around a bit as she shrieked. It only lasted a second or two and after it let go and she ran away, the rest of the on lookers slowly looked around and started to laugh hysterically. It seemed the monkeys were laughing too.

The following day we took a 4 hour bus trip to Ayuthaya, the former capital city of Thailand. We only really stayed there for one afternoon, which we spent by renting a bike (about $1 for 5 hours) and cruising around the city checking out the really interesting ruins of the former city. The biking was an experience; trying not to get in an accident with either a car, truck, tuk-tuk, motorcycle, bicycle, elephant, or pedestrian, all of whom compete for the road and path ways with reckless abandon.

Yesterday, was a bit rough as we spent the entire day in transit. 2 hours at the train station waiting for a delayed train, followed by 11 hours on a train to Chiang Mai. The trains actually aren’t too bad as you have a good amount of leg room and they fed us a few snacks and one meal. But they are incredibly bumpy/shaky which makes reading, writing, and playing cards difficult to impossible. By the end of the ride we were extremely anxious to get off.

We are in Chiang Mai now and at first glance, it looks really nice. Tonight is the King’s birthday and is a HUGE national celebration as he is a highly revered leader. It should be really interesting to see all the festivities and to party with the locals and other tourists. We’ll keep you posted.

Please keep in touch, its great to see posts or emails when we get to the internet. Hope everyone is doing real well at home.

Jarrod and Sara