Last night in Chiang Mai

By the end of our trip we were happy and tired... Dan was all curried out so he enjoyed the first burger he's had in 6 months :)

Chiang Mai's Royal Flora Ratchaphruek 2006

In honour of the King's diamond jubilee, and his upcoming 80th birthday, Thailand hosted an international horticultural exposition. Thousands of people traveled to Chiang Mai for this particular event. Since we happened to be in the city at the same time, and since all four of us were shopped out and toured out, we decided to spend our last day at the floral festival. I was especially excited to see it, and I have concluded that it was a great way to spend our last full day in Chiang Mai. Even though Dan and I stayed almost until closing time, we still didn't see everything... the gardens and venues together cover 80 hectares!

Diesel and the Kingdom

I was expecting to enjoy the Royal Flora Expo to a lesser degree and for a shorter duration than Angela. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the expo was not only about looking at pretty flora, but about appreciating how the flora relates to all aspects of life. The first exhibit we entered informed us about the sustainability initiatives of king Rama IX (to whom the whole expo was dedicated). Some of these included the restorations of mangroves, the prevention of soil erosion with vetiver grass, and highly efficient aquaculture techniques. The second exhibit we visited showcased Toyota Thailand's (royally supported) bio-diesel R&D initiative. Cleaner burning, renewable diesel, whose main by-product is organic fertilizer. (Those of you with some good fashion knowledge may notice that I am appropriately attired in a knockoff "Diesel" t-shirt)

The Orchid Pavilion

My favorite part of the floral festival was the orchid pavilion. For the most part, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves...although I will also mention that we also enjoyed smelling the chocolate scented orchids here, and seeing the world's smallest orchid (less than half a centimeter in diameter, we peered at these small blooms through a magnifying glass).

More Orchids...

Tempura Morning Glory for dinner!

For dinner Dan and I ate at a restaurant overlooking the lake. When I saw a curry with 'morning glory' listed with the English ingredients, I assumed it was also the name of a fish or something. However, when I found out it really was the flower (or stems of the flower) decided I should try it. Eating flower stems with Thai curry shrimp at an international flower festival in Chiang Mai seemed like a perfectly fitting choice. They were delicious, by the way.

Thai Silk

One of the highlights of the festival was the Thai Silk exhibit. We got to see all of the steps on the silk-making and weaving processes. We saw a live display of the life cycle of silk worms, a hands-on opportunity to make silk thread, and and an informative demonstration of traditional hand-loom silk weaving. The guide at this particular venue had good English speaking skills and a fantastic sense of humour. He followed us through the exhibit and gave us lots of commentary, made sure we tried the mulberry tea, and gave us two silkworm cocoons and a silk ratchaphreuk flower (a national Thai symbol, as well as the emblem of the festival) to take home as souvenirs.

Soiless and Desert Plant Greenhouses

As the evening was winding down, Dan and I stopped in at the hydroponic/aeroponic and desert greenhouses. When it was too dark to take pictures we headed for the bus, but took time to enjoy the water fountain show on the lake, and shop at the mini market that lined the pathway to the bus terminal. I bought a leather handbag, some postcards, and a Christmas star to hang on our tree in years to come, so that we will remember our Christmas in Thailand!

A Candle light service and chocolate cake...

While we were in Chiang Mai, the four of us stayed at 'Hudson's House', a guest house run by Gordon and Norma at the Mekong centre. In former days, Gordon was Trenton and Emily's prof at Mt. Carmel Bible college. For a few days they became surrogate parents for all of us: we joined them at a beautiful evening candle-light Christmas service, Norma fed us cocoa and Chocolate cake, and we were even surprised to find small Christmas gifts on our door Christmas morning!

Day II of the trek

On Boxing Day we woke up early after a chilly night sleeping under mosquito nets and thin sleeping bags. The eight of us ate breakfast, packed up our bags, and then we were off again! We hiked to a local school where we played some volleyball with the kids, visited another waterfall (where Dan had a bush-man's shower and left his swimming trunks behind), bought hand-made goods from local tribes people (this cat belongs to a lady from whom I bought a silk-woven table cloth. After I timidly shared a few crumbs of potato chips with it, the lady grabbed a whole bag of barbecue flavoured chips and fed it to her cat who hungrily ate them all! Maybe thats why this adorable cat is so ugly...) and ended the trip with a ride down a river on a bamboo raft!

Evening and Morning at a Karen village

Just before it began to grow dark, we arrived at a small Karen village where we spent the night. We spent the first part of the evening in the 'kitchen' (a small hut devoted to food preparation) socializing with our trek leaders, some of the villagers, and the other four tourists who were on the trek with us. After we ate the delicious Thai dinner, we spent hours sitting around the night fire entertained by our trek leaders' jokes and stories, as well as the local peoples' string games and music. Although I was a bit leery about the whole idea of a trek that involved visiting hillside tribes people, since I thought it might be terribly intrusive, insensitive, and consumeristic in that neo-colonial sort of way, I felt like the tourists, trek leaders, and villagers all seemed to enjoy connecting with each other. I like to think that we all learned something from the others.

Christmas in Thailand

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices
. . .
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

I first came across this poem in my first year at King’s, in Carol Everest’s English 211 class. My first impression of the poem quickly got mixed together with images from Yeats’ parallel poem, and well as images from his “Second Coming.” It wasn’t until years later, when I taught the poem in my own first-year English course at King’s, that I took a closer look at the poem’s imagery, history, and startling questions. More recently, I taught this poem to one of my advanced ibT TOEFL students at Yosei ELP. Perhaps it was this student’s totally fresh perspective and honest questions, or it might also have been my own recent experiences as a foreigner in a strange land, but I began to see glimpses of my own life in Eliot’s words. At the candle light service we attended with Norma and Gordon, the preacher quoted lines from this poem,.and I carried them with me throughout the trek. There were a few moment during those two days when I saw images of what that first Christmas might really have been like...straw-thatched shelters, poverty, night fires going out, cattle on the hillside, and wild poinsettias framing a rustic village setting. Beauty and ugliness juxtaposed, stirring thoughts, and forming questions that I cannot answer.

Starting Off

Our guides picked us up from Hudson House at about mid-morning on Christmas day. The first point of interest was an elephant camp, where elephants carried us to lovely landscapes and feeding stations, where a bundle of sugar cane or a bunch of bananas could be purchased for 20 baht. Our particular elephant was 4 months pregnant and (I can say without exaggeration) raised her trunk to ask for food two dozen times more often than any of the other five elephants in our caravan.
After the elephant rides, we rode a little further in the back of the pickup and began our hike. As you can see, this included some fine scenery and refreshing swimming.

A walk through the Mangroves in Krabi

The morning we left Ko Lanta we had a few hours to spend in Krabi before we caught our flight to Chiang Mai. We explored the city a bit, ate some more cashew curry, and then discovered a walkway that took us right through a mangrove forest. If we could read Thai, it probably would have been very informative, since there were labels and signs all along the paths. Despite the lack of English signage, we enjoyed spending an hour or so admiring the twisted branches, hanging roots, and strange mud formations all along the trail.