Vacation Part 1: Tham Pha Tup caves and Chiang Mai

So I am sorry that it has taken so long to get any blog posts up.  It has been a very busy week since getting back--we had yet another EIS seminar this week, and I am actually sitting in the back of a talk right now.  Luckily my work is pretty much done, so I get to spend the day on the computer, with a brief encore of my silly "acting" experience (acting like a fool and flailing my arms/screaming on stage to mimic the violent reaction of alkali metals with water).

Anyway, so now I will talk about my sports week vacation.  The first interesting thing was a visit from my cousin Eric.  He is my dad's cousin from California, but he teaches for a few weeks every summer in Bangkok at Chulalongkorn.  So this year after his classes were over he decided to come up to Nan for a couple days and visit.  This was a really nice time, especially since we had only met once or twice before in my life.

So Eric took the night bus up from Bangkok and arrived on my last day of classes before the break.  He showed up during my 1.2 class and got to see some of my students--pretty fun.  In addition to meeting my coworkers, he got to see my school and learned a bit about how secondary school works here in Thailand.

My M 1.2 class "working"

So one of the highlights of the brief visit to Nan was our Friday.  Task of the day: learn to ride a motorbike.  Eric has a motorcycle back in California, and I had been meaning to learn (since it is a pretty essential skill here), so that was our goal.  So we rented a couple of bikes and started the process of tooling around my neighborhood...slowly.  The scary bit was getting the scooters from the rental place back to my house.  Now Nan is a pretty quiet town, but the bikes were on a main street and I immediately had to go into traffic with it to get home.  I was quite scared.  But we didn't die, and we got on some small roads by school for practice.

After about an hour of lessons, we concluded that it was time for the test: riding about 10-15 km outside of town to see the caves.  So we set out for Tham Pha Tup Forest Park, with me on my snazzy pink motorbike and my roommate Rhea riding with Eric.  While the ride itself isn't terribly difficult in theory, it was made more challenging by the fact that it was my first day riding and by the fact that it rained the whole time.  We had to take shelter from the rain for a bit, but it wasn't a big deal.  The biggest issue was at the very end of the journey when we turned off the highway onto the gravel road--I was traveling at about 5 km/h and turned onto the gravel.  The bike freaked out, wheels slipped out from under me, and BAM!  Ended up on the ground with the bike on top of me.  Luckily it was a pretty minor crash.  I was wearing sturdy shoes, capri pants, and a jacket, so there was minimal road rash.  Mostly just bruising.  Sadly, the right mirror on the bike was smashed.  RIP mirror!

Taking Shelter

Rhea in the rain

One of us looking silly...and bikes in the background!

I have to say the caves themselves were a bit unimpressive.  We ended up hiking over a mini-mountain to see some of them, and they were quite small and not that striking.  But what was enjoyable was the mountain and rain forest scenery.  It was particularly enchanting to see it in the rain.  We even found a nice pond area to sit by for a bit.

The trip back was the particularly interesting part.  Eric didn't want to walk on the tiny path back over the mountain, so we decided to take the paved path back.  The hypothesis was that there wouldn't be a paved path unless it went back to the parking area.  WRONG!!!  Turns out we went back over the mountain, but instead of finding ourselves anywhere near the parking lot, we ended up in a farmer's orchard.  Yeah.  We officially had no idea where we were.  So we just wandered down the path.  We were nervous when we found a larger path since we didn't know which way to turn, but we took a vote and kept walking.  Success!  We eventually made our way to a real road, partially through luck and partially by following the sound of an airplane.  Turns out it was not the correct highway, but after stopping a series  of cyclists and confused looks, we did manage to get directions to the highway.  What ensued was a very long walk back to the park, but at least we knew we were going the right way!  After about 10 km, we did find our bikes and drove back to town.  VICTORY!!  The rental people were not too pleased that I crashed the bike and were chiding me for not going slow (cha cha!)--it was lost it translation that my crash happened at 5 km/h!  Ah well, it was less than $20 to fix the broken mirror, so no harm no foul.  Quite an adventure!

Rainy, but quite beautiful

On the farm!

Which way home?

On the highway

What happened!?!?!?!

After cleaning up we had a nice dinner out by the river.  I have been there a few times with teachers and it has great food.  It also has the added bonus of giving a nice view of the river and boat practice.  It was very exciting!  So after our day of adventures we settled down for a relaxing dinner.  Gina also came with us, so it was quite a nice time.  We even had one of my new favorites--pak bung tot grawp (tempura fried morning glory).

One of the boat teams at their evening practice

And so ended Eric's visit to Nan.  The next morning we got up and came over to school where we managed to catch a ride on a van of science students going to Chiang Mai.  Pee Nong, Pee Mam, Pee Goy, and the students were going to Chiang Mai for a competition of some sort.  This meant that we got both a speedy and free ride, which was excellent.

M 4 students heading to Chiang Mai

We were going to Chiang Mai to meet up with some of Eric's French Freemason brothers.  They were having a ceremony for the summer solstice, so we made the trip to observe it.  Although we missed many of the proceedings, we did manage to make it for the fire ceremony and also the dinner.  There were some very interesting people there--Frenchman living all over southeast Asia.  Many interesting life stories.  It was a very different experience for me, but since the French Freemasons are much more secretive than the Americans, I can't show many pictures here.

Fun time.  We relaxed in the evening, then spent the next day (Sunday) touring Chiang Mai.  I won't include too many pictures since this is already a really long post, but it was a good time.  The first part of the day was spent at Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, the temple on the hills over Chiang Mai.  This time there were some traditional Thai dancers outside the temple, so that was quite fun to observe.  Eric also took time to ring the bells outside the temple for good luck.

The wat--as gorgeous as always

Beautiful dancing

Wow!

The bells!

The second part of our day was at the Chiang Mai Zoo.  It was so much fun!  It seems like they had everything there--even penguins.  It was quite fun to wander around by bus and see the different animals.  We also took the "monorail"...I think an octogenarian with a walker moves faster than this monorail.  It creaked along.  To prove my point:  a pigeon walked along the track in front of the tram.  And no, it did not need to fly to get out of our way.  It just kept walking.  Ah well, it was amusing.  Highlights: the 3 pandas that live in A/C splendor,  various elephants, incredibly cute koalas, so many birds, very funny gibbons, and some mating panthers.  I will add a couple pics here, but after that I am going to have to cut myself off.  This is addicting!

Getting frisky

Sleepy

These guys were so gorgeous...couldn't get over them

Must. Eat. Banana.

We had a lovely time, but at this point Eric had to head back to Bangkok and I would continue my travels the next day.  So we bade each other farewell and went our separate ways.  And thus ended phase 1 of my sports week vacation!

P.S.  Sorry for the length of this entry--it is tough to get all this info together and I hate to cut out anything!  Feel free to skim/skip as you feel necessary :P