The sky is alive with a thousand lights

It has been just over a week and I' m still in one piece with a million things to say. This past week I took my first Thai train. To all readers, try and get the bottom bunk. The top one is shit, very short and too much light. However, the dinning/smoking car is where the action is at. Walking in there at around 730 am nearly every table had a large beer bottle on it. Apparently there is no sensible time to start drinking, its just ALL good. Besides the cramped quarters the ride was great, especially after my fifth beer in as the train was about four hours late. Supposedly one of the third class cars derailed in the night and, well, they certainly would have had to do some work to right it.

I took the train to Chiang Mai. A bustling town of about 130,000 with a small town feel to it. Usually tranquil and quiet this past weekend it was f-ing bumping for the festival Loi Krathong, aka the festival of lights. The town is a thriving pulsating party for the three day festival. There are many parades and processions and hundreds of fireworks being ignited every moment once the sun goes down. This is down with little regard to safety as some are riding the back of scooters and firing five foot long roman candles. Whether they are under trees or power lines it doesn't matter. The river banks where much of the action is for the launching of small lotus shaped boats made of banana leaves with a candle and incense is packed with people shoulder to shoulder. There are also food and craft stands everywhere you look. Standing on the river bank one gets the sense of a full blown city party where there are fireworks being launched from one bank to the other and back. It is f-ing raucous.

The most beautiful sight is the launching of glowing paper lanterns. About three or four feet tall and two feet wide there is a fire source in the center of the lantern at the bottom that creates the lift for the lanterns. The lantern is held down by a few people until there is enough lift and it is released into the sky. There are literally hundreds of these lanterns floating in the sky at any moment and in every direction, with tens and tens taking off every second. This is quite a dazzling sight to see, nearly magical. Certainly there must be a village somewhere that the drifting lanterns fall to, hopefully they have a need for many thin metal rings. This is by far the coolest celebration I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing, I recommend it to all who have the chance.


Chiang Mai is well known for its trekking so I trekked. It was great. There was a lot of jungle and the guides were entertaining. The group of people was great with only an eight year gap between the youngest and oldest, myself being the youngest, just wonderful dynamics. We got to witness a hill tribe and sleep in thatched communal sleeping huts the first evening. The dinners that the guides made were absolutely delicious, and the opium they smoked in the village was quite good as well, great for trekking long and hard. Walking to the village on the first day I though I heard wooden wind chimes, but what I came to discover was that they were the nicest sounding cow bells every, what a treat. All the villages we went through were in a national park, so no power lines were allowed which encouraged the use of solar power which I believe was subsidized by the government. This all surprised me quite a bit.

On the second day we trekked to a beautiful waterfall were we swam and played and stayed for the evening in individual huts built on stilts, I assume for the rainy season. We even built a fire there. Who would have imagined a fire in the middle of the jungle next to a raging waterfall, it was sweet. The next day was most adventure filled as we got to go elephant trekking, which wasn't really trekking but more of a small trail we walked around. My self and two others were on this giant elephant, probably 15 feet tall. Luckily didn't have to ride on the neck because this guy was a lumbering giant. So that was great fun except that it stopped every thirty seconds for another banana that we were feeding it and held us up quite a bit. Also the handlers spiky instrument, not so fun, sometimes when he would hit it on the trunk it sounded like hitting a musical pipe of sorts. Anh, they have thick hides. Finally we went river rafting on bamboo rafts, we got into some water fights and tried capsizing each others rafts. It was good. We got back to Chang Mai that night, last night and I found this restaurant were they ring you a clay pot over coals with broth in it and it is buffet style for all the meets and fish and veggies that you put in there raw. I had no idea what I was doing, it was all delicious but from watching other I now know better what to do. Took the train back to Bangkok last night, and it sucked... Def. third class no beds, no dinning car, and way too much AC, at least they turned the lights off. Tonight I am off to the island of Ko Samui to get my diving certification. Yay...


Thoughts

-Oh my Buddha

-Elephant farts stink BAD

-Fat men should not stand in their undies in a glass window front fish spa that's on the second floor for everyone to see. (That's where you stand in a tank of small fish and they eat off the dead skin on your feet)


I promise I will soon add photos.