Thailand is the first country we’ve been to on the race that actually feels far away from home. It’s the first country we’ve been to that has none of the comforts of home–signs and menus were all in Thai, english is not widely spoken, food was different, elaborate spirit houses hovered on every street corner, stores and homes with Christianity only makes up 1% of the population. But I love the Thai culture and it is definitely the most beautiful place we’ve been to this far. During our month, we battled the family to see who could out-serve who pretty much… and I think the Ala’s won. Rommel wanted to make sure we saw a lot of Thailand during our stay there. One of the first days we took a beautiful wooden boat ride around some islands in Phuket. We also went to the “James Bond” island which was really awesome. At one point during the day we moved from our boat into a kayak type thing and went exploring in caves. They had little entrances that we had to lay down in our boats to get under and then ended up in lagoon type things. Haha it’s kind of hard to explain, check out the pictures! The Chinese new year was going on during on first week in Thailand and with a high Chinese population there, night markets covered the streets. Rommel took us there to experience the local Thai culture which started off with a feast of bugs. We ate grasshoppers, crickets, and a few other ones that I don’t care to know what they were. Some of them weren’t too bad because they were just crunchy and had seasoning on them, but I did bite into one that squirted in my mouth which made me call it quits. I guess it’s cool to say I’ve done, but I wouldn’t go for round two. I loved walking around in the tightly packed stores and alley ways soaking up the Asian culture. We saw a lot of different food, drinks, clothes, and lots of things that just made us feel pretty huge. Everything in Asia is so much smaller than America–transportation, clothes, shoes…pretty much most things.
James Bond Island
Laying down to get under the caves
Cassie, Me and Christy 🙂
Another stop along our journey that day was exploring a cave. The formations were like nothing I’ve ever seen and looked like crystal. We also stopped and had lunch on our own island–shrimp fried rice, bananas and oreos–then went swimming in the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen. We spent more time on the boat soaking up the beauty of the islands and our last stop was to a floating Muslim village. The whole community is built on water and floating docks. They had a whole row of markets that tourists stop by throughout the day, so that’s the main source of income. It was cool to see how some people live such a different and simple lifestyle.
Exploring in the caves
Floating Village
Even though the islands were some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, I think my favorite Thailand adventure was riding elephants. We only paid $3 USD for an elephant trek through the jungle. The day before our adventure, we were driving in the back of Rommel’s truck and stopped to pet elephants on the side of the road…how cool is that?! The next day we got to our elephant trekking destination a little early and the guys were bathing the elephants. They were so cute seeing such big animals splash around in the water like puppies. The little Thai men were just jumping from elephant to elephant as they were rolling around in the water…ah it was so cool! My new favorite animal is an elephant 🙂 Anyways Ginger, Cassie and I got up on the seat on the elephants back with a rope as our seat belt..what a joke. After a few steps, our Thai guide said one of us could sit on the Tito’s (our elephant) head. You better believe I hopped right out of my seat and settled myself on Tito’s head. When we were finished, we fed them bananas and I began to plot ways to steal one, but that never came to fruition.
One of our last days there, we talked Janene and Rommel into letting the kids out of school a little early and we all spent the afternoon at a beautiful waterfall. There was a cool swimming pool with fish that come and nibble your feet to get the dead skin–people actually pay for that at spas, but I was not a fan of it. We had a really great day playing in the water, reading in our hammocks, playing frisbee and ended it with playing in the rain. During our month of ministry we got rest and out-served. Again, definitely not what I expected on the World Race, but a really great month with amazing people!
