Chillin' in Chiang Mai

Greetings from Chiang Mai!

It took us about 11 hours on a night bus to get here but we made it. The night bus was an interesting experience. Since it originated in Bangkok, the full bus picked us up on the side of the freeway in Ayutthaya where we were staying. There were six people picked up in Ayutthaya and exactly six seats available, none of them together. Sleeping next to a complete stranger is...awkward.

We arrived at our guesthouse around 7am but our room wasn't ready until 11am so, exhausted, we sat around for a while in the lobby, went out for a little breakfast, walked around town, then returned to the hotel after realizing we weren't wearing sunscreen. We napped until 4 (glorious) and decided to check out the Sunday Walking Street. After eating dinner compliments of street vendors we tried to find a cool place to hang out by our guesthouse, but realized that all of the establishments catered to old white men traveling alone...

Our second day in Chiang Mai was spent searching for a new guesthouse with a monthly rate.

Day three has held many interesting sights and interactions with Thai people. We were interviewed by two different groups of university students for a project and we also met a primary school teacher while walking around the Old City who gave us some helpful tips for the job hunt. So far we are really liking Chiang Mai.

This shirt is my sreason for hainess. :)

See?

The shirt really tickles Nick's fancy, too.

Our Sunday Walking Street perusing was interrupted by yet another torrential downpour, so we took cover. What better place than in a massage chair? The woman on the right got a kick out of giving Nick a good walloping followed by a "tickle tickle."

The students from the School For the Blind put on performances throughout the walking street.

After sunset the entire walkway is bumper to bumper walkers. I thought the street was busy when we took this picture.

On one of the offshoots we found a vendor selling wine to benefit Chiang Mai University, so of course we had to taste it. Mine was langon wine and Nick sampled the ginseng wine. Interesting.

This is one of the many illuminated Wats we found during our walk.

This little girl and her sister were beautiful performers. Both seemed quite comfortable with the attention from walkers.

Check out the dragons and the pillars inside.

This is the place we will call "home" for the next month, maybe longer.

Its so cute, and only $13.50 a night, including daily breakfast, cleaning and utilities!

Night 2 outside the Tha Phae gate to the Old City, where we met Tom, a Thai-American who hooked us up with a job lead!

A view of the new city opposite the Tha Phae gate.

We're having a ton of fun and are planning on looking for a job here within the next couple of days. Hopefully our next post will also include some new friends!

Hugs, kisses, and misses!

Ty and Nick

Adventures in Ayutthaya

Nick and I have had a blast here in Ayutthaya! This town has broadened our experience a lot, making it, at least for me, a favorite. We've seen some beautiful cultural and historical sights, had some amazing animal encounters, enjoyed great conversation with Thais and tourists alike, and we sampled the street vendor food, the last of which I'm paying for today. It was worth the stomach ache. We'll save the food descriptions for another post, but we certainly have some stories to share!

The elephants are taken down to the river twice a day to be bathed. Standing between two was quite a thrill.

"Yyyyyyikes! Those tusks are a little to close to my face!" This awe inspiring creature had an intimidating set of tusks. I'm sure they could cause quite a concussion.

These are our new friends Tanja and Thomas from Germany and Switzerland. The owner left us alone in his bar for about a half hour. We have no idea why he left, but he closed the door and pulled down the metal roll-down door so no one else would come in.

When he returned he sat down to talk with us and give us an impromptu Thai language lesson where we learned the proper pronunciation of some key phrases that we've been saying incorrectly for about, I don't know, three weeks. :) I must say, I received some compliments on my ability to say Sa-wat-de-ka (hello) and Kap-koon-ka (thank you).

"Ty, are you sure this is a good idea?"

"Just smile and look at the camera!" Yeah...we're petting a tiger. I'm just sayin'.

For Facebook friends, I'll try to upload some videos. Any tips on a faster way to upload video to blogger? We've been unsuccessful.

Right now we're still in Ayutthaya but we're taking a night bus up to Chiang Mai tonight. Unfortunately we had to make the decision to postpone seeing the monkeys in Lopburi and the monk-operated tiger sanctuary in Kanchanaburi. There's no easy way to get from either place to Chiang Mai by bus or train. We'll save it for when we have some visitors with whom to share the experience. Any takers?

The thing about the beach is the sand...

The thing about the beach is the sand, and so we decided, after all, to visit Koh Phangnan after all. Originally we heard it was an all-out drug-fueled rage-fest destination, and so we avoided it, but it turns out the other side of the island is empty and so we decided to hop on a catamaran to check it out.

<---- Holy crap, we thought building our deck was tricky (Dre, Joe, Bob, Drew, we'd like a new deck here if you get a chance =)

Anyway, so we get to the island just in time for a looming monsoon - you can see it in the distance in this photo. I'm trying to act all cavalier in the photo, but I know it's comin'.

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

Boo Ya!

Despite the drizzle, we decided we liked the whole secluded paradise thing and so we decided to hang for a few days in a little bungalow and see what else the island had in store, which turned out, quite delightfully, to be just about nothing...

and so Ty enlisted the aid of a local nail technician to get her all pretty (she begged me to get my Wookie-ass toes tamed too, but I was way too dang macho and so I got soooooper artsy with our camera in the meanwhile.

You see those soothing blue hues? This is the stuff spoken word poems are made of - ahhhhhh.

Okay, so I'm not going to lie, I quickly became jealous and began to crave some pampering too. After some preliminary research I found, side-by-side, the only two massage options that our quaint stretch of sand had to offer

Option # 1

Option # 2

Naturally, who wants to bother with a "magic" massage when you can have an "Ok" massage. Duh. Holy smokes by the way, "Thai Massages" are more like "Thai Beat Downs." They really smack you around.

Yet another one of my Ansel Adams moments... No autographs please.

After our manis, pedis and butt woopins, we happened upon a spectacular couple from Holland, Tom and Manon - we grabbed some beach-side BBQ with them. The evening turned longer, as they tend to, and we ended up sharing some great laughs while hiding out under- cover during yet another monsoon.

But unfortunately, like we've learned from our Buddhists peeps over here in Thailand, all things are transitory, and this part of our trip, too, had to come to an end...

Ty and I bidding fond farewells to the island life on our last magnificent evening on the beach. Next stop, Bangkok (not pictured is our quite unintentional stop at the red-light district - it was dark and scary and very, very brief).

The next morning, we hopped a bus and ended up in Ayuthaya, an ancient city sprinkled with amazing ruins and Wats: here are some of the highlights.

The guesthouse - "Welcome home!"

Yeah, we read Lonely Planet (apparently we were the only ones), you gotta cover your skin in the temples - hence all the long garments and the sweating... Ty's diggin' her temple garb though - Hot!

After a long day of temple-hopping, Ty, or "Tom" as she's referred to by confused Thai people (her new nickname has been officially reduced to "T"), became a little delirious on the Tuk-Tuk between ruin sights.

Yikes.

We thought this was magnificent.

Hundreds (thousands?) of years ago the Burmese sacked Ayuthaya and burned and destroyed it; what's left are these ruins. If you look closely, you can see fragments of buddha sculptures beheaded and burned.

Lookin' pretty chic I think.

Of course there were hundreds of baby elephants wandering around (no, we didn't pay anything to have this picture taken, ahem).

You know who really still get a big bang out of working with elephants? Thais.

<>

Yeah, I'd like to say it wasn't as steep as it looks (this would warrant an "Oh Gad!" from Karalyn).

Check little white me out for frame of reference.

A quick snack in the market before the next stop.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was watching the people pay homage and respect to Buddha - I'm reading Siddhartha again and that's final (Demian, you up for another round of Siddhartha - boop?)

Our favorite photo of the day.

We've concluded we dig this place enough to stick around for another day or so, and then we're off to Lopburi (I guess there are monkey's there and we're suckers for cute and furry - you gettin' this tex?) and then it's off to Chiang Mai where we might actually get a job and stuff - maybe. More later...