Jarrod and Sara’s Site

 Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing well. We just got back to Chiang Mai after a three day forest trek in the surrounding mountains, which was fantastic.

We were with a great group of about 12 people and two great Thai guides for our trip. The first day, the bus dropped us off at a trailhead and we had about a two hour hike through these incredibly beautiful farm lands, rice paddies, and forest. The landscape is so different than home and it was such a surreal experience to be hiking through a rice paddy in the woods in Thailand as the sun was coming down…. just amazing.

The first night we arrived at a Karen Hilltribe village where we would have dinner and spend the night. It seemed everyone had mixed emotions about the experience of being in the village and I don’t have time to go over it here, but it was an interesting experience. The people were extremely friendly, tons of kids running around and playing just like kids at home (only some of them had machetes as toys), and adults sitting around campfires talking. It was humbling to see how little they have and it was a very peaceful, relaxing place.

The next day was the biggest hiking day. We hiked for a total of about 4 or 5 hours, but there were many breaks and the hiking was not too difficult. We got to see a lot of nice waterfalls and a few more remote villages. The landscape itself though was really just incredible. There was no way to make the pictures do it any justice, but the best way to imagine it is like you were walking through Disney World’s version of a jungle. Everything seemed oversized and bright green, and when you emerged from the forest it was usually to enter some sort of orchard with huge banana trees or something similar. It was a great place to hike.

The last day we did a little more hiking and emerged in civilization for the more touristy part of this particular trip… bamboo rafting and elephant riding. The bamboo rafting was fun, three of us stood on a long raft consisting of about ten bamboo poles tied together and balanced like on a surf board as we floated down stream (mostly slowly with a couple of quick water parts). We only fell once as we smashed into a rock, but other than that it was pretty smooth. Next we headed to the elephant farm. This was really fun although it wasn’t great seeing the elephants all tied up… but Sara and I rode on a saddle type thing on the back while our mahout rode on the elephants head. It was pretty funny because the elephant in the line behind us was constantly sticking his trunk up and poking us in the back and putting it in between us to try to get a banana. Needless to say we got covered in elephant snot and went through a lot of bananas. At the end we went to a huge bucket for the elephant to drink from and got soaked as they all splashed water on each other and us. It was a lot of fun and the elephants seemed quite relaxed as they had no problem passing wind (more like a hurricane coming from an elephant) and going to the bathroom freely and liberally throughout the trip…

We are heading to Laos today for the next leg of the journey. Keep in touch and we hope you are all having a great December.

Jarrod and Sara

Wow, we have had quite a busy week! We arrived in Chiang Mai last Wednesday which was the King’s 80th Birthday. This was quite a celebration here in Thailand and the plans have been in the works since we arrived at the end of November. He has been king since age 18 and is really loved by the Thai people so the celebrations were huge. We headed out of our guesthouse around 7pm to find out where the party was and walked by a local Wat (temple) that was lit my many small candles that beckoned us to go in and look around a little. We were delighted when a small gathering of novice monks and Thai people invited us in to help light lanterns and lift them into the night sky. It was great to be involved in a small group of local people taking and laughing and having a great time. Lighting the lanterns was no easy task though, as you had to wait for it to fill with heat and smoke and gently coax it into the sky, mine landed in a tree and I was horrified that it would burn down! They just laughed at me a little and all enjoyed throwing stones to coax it down.

We then had a day of Thai food cooking lessons at a farm that was about 20 minutes out of town. We headed there after first going to a local market to get some supplies and learn more about Thai food ingredients. They use many different seasonings here and each dish has a little spicy, salty, sour, and sweet. I never imagined some of the ingredients that they used to make those four flavors. When we got to the farm, we had a tour of some of their crops and saw the natural ingredients that they use like lemon grass, ginger, beans, eggplant, lime leaves, cilantro, and garlic. It was great to get out of the city for a day and enjoy the fresh air and peace and quiet. Our group was about 7 people and we each had our own cooking station. Our teacher, Sue, went through how to make a number of different Thai dishes with us after demonstrating first. The best part was eating the fruits of our labor at the end. We promise to have a Thai food dinner party when we get home, there is no excuse not to as we received a great cookbook at the end of the day.

Miss you all tons! Sara (and Jarrod)

 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

What’s up everyone? Hope everything is going well back home, thanks for all the emails and posts, please keep them coming.

Sorry we haven’t posted in a little while, but haven’t had much internet time. Things are going great and we got to see a ton of Bangkok in the last few days. We’re trying to upload a few photos now but having a little trouble. They need an Owl Watch IT department over here. Anyway, we spent a week in Bangkok and loved exploring the city. It seemed that everywhere we went there was something interesting to see and do. The last couple of days the big activities were attending a Muay-Thai boxing match. The matches themselves were fun to watch, but also sitting in the “third class” seats behind a fence, we got to watch all the gambling that took place. We have absolutely no idea how it worked. In between each round people shouted frantically and put up various fingers at each other, but no money changed hands and there seemed to be no one in charge. It was hilarious to watch, but we wish we knew what the hell was going on. Also, there were young kids who sold refreshments and beer and they loved coming up and talking to us (as we were the only “westerners” in the third class section). As they got more comfortable they started coming up more often and asking us to pronounce words that they had written down and then laughing hysterically when we said them. It was great. We also got our first thai massages at the Wat Pho massage school. These were intense. When we finished Sara said, “Was it me or was that really painful?”, which it was, but still felt great somehow and afterwards we felt so loose and relaxed.

We are currently in Kanchanaburi, which is about a three hour train ride out near Myanmar border (don’t worry, not too close), the home of the Bridge over the River Kwai. We went to the Thailand-Burma Railway Center today which was a great museum detailing the story of the “Death Railway” which was built to connect Thailand to Burma for the Japanese troops. It was built by thousands of Allied POWs in absolutely horrifying conditions. After the museum we walked down to the actual “Bridge Over River Kwai” made famous by the movie. It was an extremely interesting afternoon and it was great to be able to walk over and explore around the bridge.

Tomorrow we’re going to visit the Erawan National Park an hour outside Kanchanaburi… we’ll keep you posted.

Please keep in touch. Hope everyone’s doing well.

Jarrod and Sara

Thanks for all of the great messages. It is so nice to be in an internet cafe halfway across the world and get such nice messages from home.

We spent our first day in Bangkok exploring the city from 8am to 6pm. It is a great city to walk around in as there are tons of markets and people to look at. There are people and dogs everywhere, and cars, motorbikes, and three wheel tuk tuks. This all leads to tons of fumes and smog. The best part was walking around through the various markets where you can buy anything from food on the street, tools, watches, snakes, any who knows what else. It pays to be a good barterer though, we both had our first experience with this and boy do they drive a tough bargain. We also saw two of the three main temples Wat Arun and Wat Po which were pretty impressive. Hopefully we will hit the Grand Palace later today.

The food is great so far, we have tried red curry, phat thi, and some other different dishes with bamboo and hot chilis. It has been great so far but we havn’t dared noodles or rice for breakfast yet.

Check out our pics and we are thinking of you all!

Love, Sara and Jarrod

Hi guys! We are in Brooklyn NY at Evan’s humble abode getting the finishing touches ready for our big day. Just had some “serious” nachos with Evan and Katy at the Trailer Park Lounge in Manhattan, not bad for our last meal here in the US.

Thanks to all for the well wishes! Lets hope for some good movies and snacks on the plane. Sara and Jarrod

OK, so 6 days from now Jarrod and I will be on a plane to Bangkok. I am trying to figure out how to use this sweet sweet blog that Mark geeked up so you can all trace our journey. Here goes!