The race from Trang to Phuket was more than a normal race from point A to point B. There were tasks… and they weren’t easy. Some of the tasks were fun, others will be unforgetable. I can’t believe I did this stuff. Here is the story.
Gary, Katherine, Sarah, and I were prepared for the race as best as we could be. We had heard there would be some physical tasks invovled with the race leg, and as we are the “nerd” team, that frightened us a little. Praise God we have Sarah to represent in that aspect. But in the cargo truck on the way to the starting point, our host gave us a riddle. The first team to solve the riddle got the race information 5 minutes before everyone else. Way to go nerd team, Katherine stepped up and answered first, giving us an extra 5 minutes to look over our destination points, tasks, challenges, and rules.
Our host went over the sheets with everyone. Because we had already gotten a peek, Katherine was off looking for transportation or maps or anything that would help. The challange was to leave Trang in route to Krabi Thailand. At Krabi we had to climb the steps of a temple, only indicated by the clue “Tiger’s Eye View.” There were over 1000 steps at this place and between the whole team a total of 3000 steps had to be climbed with two people reaching the top. This was only the beginning.
When the teams were released Katherine stood by the luggage and Sarah, Gary, and I took off in different directions to investigate transportation options to Krabi. It’s fun to run around a bus station asking, “Does anybody have a map. I need a map of Thailand. Anybody? Anybody?” I had no luck and went back to our meeting point. Gary was there with Katherine and told me that Sarah had found us a taxi. We gathered up all our luggage and Sarah’s and ran around the corner. We crossed the street to get to the taxi. It was an unsual taxi. This is how we got our taxi…
Sarah runs around the corner, “Anybody speak English?” A lady steps up to talk with her. Sarah informs her that we need quick transportation to Krabi for a team of four people. She points across the street, “There is a taxi.” Gary and Sarah are looking confused. There were no taxis across the street. They know what taxis look like… some are green, some are yellow, they are small…they know what taxis look like and there are no taxis across the street. The lady waves across the street and a man waves back. Still, no visable taxis. Gary looks to Sarah and says, “I’m not seeing a taxi are you?” Finally they assume that the guy waving across the street must be a taxi driver, but the taxis are somewhere else, around the corner maybe. They cross the street and the guy opens the door to an old, drown sports car. We’re talking like a late ’60s model Datsun sportscar.
That’s the taxi we took from Trang to Krabi… a fast car with a fast driver. We left the other teams in Trang, looking franticially for transportation. In the car we decided to start on some of the other tasks on our list. We had to come up with Biblical references to a list of 101 ways to worship God that we made on the island. Gary and I broke out our Bibles and started to dig deep. Sarah took the list and read off what each of us would be looking for. Katherine took out paper and recorded the findings. By the time we reached Krabi we were windblown and finished with the list of Scriptures. We even had time to plot out the rest of the trip.
Our taxi driver didn’t speak much English so we had trouble telling him we needed to find, “Tiger’s Eye View” and decode that to a temple. He took us to the middle of town and stopped at a tourist agency. Gary and I ran inside to discover that we were going to the Tiger Cave Temple, and got directions for our driver. Once we got to the Temple, it was pouring rain, we found shelter for our luggage, paid our driver, and Gary, Katherine, and Sarah took off to run up the 3000 steps and reach the top of the temple.
As I was waiting by the luggage I noticed the Lime team was gathering up their stuf, loading it into a van and taking off. The Yellow team arrived shortly after, running wild around the grounds in all different directions. My brain was going crazy trying to figure out what they were doing. Katherine came back after she climbed her required amount of steps and we got to work on figuring out the transporation to the second destination point, Cha Long Phuket. As we requested a taxi, the Blue team arrived. Things were getting tight and bunched up. This was exciting.
Our host had put an intereting spin on this part of the race. In honor of the Thai New Year, a huge water throwing festival, teams had the option of ambushing other teams. A team could try and get every member of an opposing team visably wet and freeze them where they stood for 20 minutes. The trick was that every member of the opposing team had to be ambushed in a span of exactly one minute. So if you soaked three people on a team, you had to catch up with the fourth team member before a minute ran out. If you didn’t, it wasn’t an ambush, and that team wasn’t frozen.
If I had thought about it when the blue team walked by, Katherine and I could have soaked them. We didn’t though. 5 minutes later Sarah comes running back to the group explaining that the yellow team had ambushed the blue team! Immediately we put together two and two and knew that the Yellow team were trying acting so crazy because they were trying to ambush teams. So in defense, as we waited for our driver to show up, we made Gary wait at least 150 yards away, down the street. Sure enough, as the yellow team finished their climb, Clara and Francios come running from behind us with buckets of water. I was surely dead in my tracks as Clara dumped her bucket, not on my head, but on my backpack. Katherine and Sarah couldn’t escape either, but in a moment of desparation Sarah screams, “RUN GARY RUN!” And down the street you hear the clomping of his shoes as he takes off, followed closely behind by Francios. All Gary had to do was outrun him for at least a minute. Due to quick thinking and quick feet, he got away. Francios gave up, and we escaped our first attempted ambush.
The taxi arrived and we loaded up, headed towards Phuket for the rest of the challenges. This is where it got tough. The lime and yellow team had left before us. Blue was behind us, and nobody had seen the brown team since we left Trang. Our goal was to hurry to Phuket because once we were there we had to go to Siam Safari and “Kee Chang”… translation… ride elephants. We were also suppsoed to compile a list of all the tricks the elephants do in a show. The hard part was getting there before the place closed for the day. This could be the equalizer that brought all the teams into another huge pile-up.
A few hours later we arrived in Phuket, our driver drops us off at the Elephant place, and Katherine and I run up to the ticket counter. “Can we ride the elephants today?” Long pause…. “No we are closed…tomorrow.” AHHH, utter frustration sits in. Katherine, Sarah, and I pleaded. We would pay extra, we would clean up, we would do anything. We even asked for them to open early the next day, but to no avail. At last, we gave in and made our appointment to ride the elephants at 8:00 AM. We got back in the taxi with the news that one team had gotten to ride the elephants that day, and that another team was also scheduled at 8:00 the next morning. We assumed that the Lime team, the first to leave the temples, had made it in time to ride the elephants and now had a huge advantage over everyone else. We also assumed the yellow team had beaten us there and we would both arrive to ride the elephants early in the morning and we would race head to head to the finish line. But then we a reality check.
As we were pulling off in our taxis we saw a truck with a pile of luggage in it. At first we thought it was a truck with the South Africans luggage in it, but then we saw that it was the Brown Team’s luggage! Sure enough, at that very moment, at Safari truck pulls into the station with the brown team, the only team to have finished the elephant riding that day! We were stunned. We couldn’t figure it out in our heads. When we left Trang they were standing on a street corner… and we had to have beaten them to the temples, and yet we never saw them at the temples. The only logical explanation was that the Brown team had went beyond the first stopping point to the second stopping point to finish the elephant riding before it closed, and now they were going to backtrack to climb the temple. Smart… but risky. We wondered if they would get to the temple in time or if it even closed. Perhpas we weren’t out of the race yet.
We went to a hotel to ditch our stuff and finish up the tasks in town that night. The remaining tasks required some internet research and shopping. We had to buy three items, an appropriate T-shirt, a “loud frog,” and a cross between a volleyball and soccer ball that is used here in Thailand. These were only clues and required some decoding. So our team split up. Gary and I went to the internet cafe to do our research and Sarah and Katherine, the bargainers, went out to shop. They couldn’t spend more than 400 Baht on all three of these items.
At the internet cafe Gary and I had to find out the Buddhist teachings on Jesus and report on it, translate a verse in Thai, and find the name of the fruit that isn’t allowed in elevators or some public buildings. Later we would have to purchase this fruit in the market and report on it’s taste. Gary found out about hte Buddhist Messiah, and I quickly translated the verse. It took some work to
find the name of the fruit, but at last we come across the “Durian fruit.” It smells so bad most people don’t eat it and it isn’t allowed in places. But, it supposedly tastes really great once you open it up and suck up the courage to try it. We left with our information an met up with our shopping buddies who had finished their task successfully.
Now the hard part… we had to find that stinky fruit and eat it, and we also had some other foreign delights to try and eat. Our mission: Every team member had to eat either a roach, a cricket, or locust and compare it’s taste and texture to the silk worm. Did I mention everyone had to do this? I don’t even eat the normal Thai food! Still, I don’t know what’s more embarassing, the fact that I had to eat this stuff or that I had to try and buy them with the intention of eating them. It was quite the difficult task considering the language barrier. How do you say, “I need to eat a silk worm,” in Thai?
We went to the markets, find our Durian fruit after some struggles and got to work on the bug hunt. The guy that sold us the fruit seemed helpful, so I drew a picture of a bug and a worm and showed it to him. I pointed to the bug
…then to the worm… then to my mouth. He looked puzzled so I thought quickly through my options. I took my right leg, rubbed it against my left leg and screeched. It was my attmept to represent a cricket… The guy looked at me with a set face for a moment, and then burst into laughter. He wasn’t just laughing either, he was cackling. After he calmed down he looked at me and said, “You want bananna?” AHHH, no I don’t want a bananna, I wanted a bug! I told him this and he just shook his head. “No free banannas.” Oh… well okay then. We think it was his attempt to give us nutrients other than those found in bugs. He must have felt sory for us because he gave us like 15 banannas.
We searched through two markets and had no luck finding bugs. it was getting late and we were at a loss for what to do. All we had found was a couple of giant roaches and we weren’t eating those if we didn’t find worms to compare them to. But we really wanted to find a cricket or locust because the roaches were quite disgusting with giant eyeballs. As we were about to give up a guy and his wife at the market seemed to get an understanding of what we wanted. YES! Finally we were moving again. Our friends helped us out and gave Gary a ride to the place that would hopefully have worms and locusts. We waited at the market and a few minutes later Gary pulls up on the back of this guy’s motorbike, bugs in hand. Is it okay to be excited that you found bugs to eat? I don’t know.
Back at the room, we prepped oursleves for the task. We laid out our bugs and worms and poured some orange juice in cups to wash it down. The banannas were close by for a new fr esh taste after our adventure. Sarah
, though she was nervous and upset all day about this part of the race, set down with a stern face and said, “Let’s get this done.” I wasn’t feeling so about it. That roach was staring at me I know it. We downed our spicy, salty worms with little effort. It was a quick crunch or two and a tough swallow. Yuck. Now for the big bugs. we decided that the locusts were looking like the least gross bugs to eat. Gary stepped up first and ate his locust. I didn’t even want to watch, but the experience had to be documented on film. Sarah and Katherine went together and made the step onto the wild side. Me, I was still holding mine… oragne juice in one hand, bug in the other. Could I really do this? My team depended on me. How bad would it be if they all ate their bugs for sake of the race and then it didn’t matter because I wouldn’t eat mine. I had to put that thing in my belly. “Get in my belly!” I took it down, crunched the head a few times, and swallowed hard. I didn’t like it at all and I drank a lot of orange juice to try and cover up the fact that I had eaten a locust. blah! At least the tasks for that day were finished. We all went to bed, tired and full of bugs.
The next morning we got up extra early to get to the elephant safari. We were worried that there would be a build-up of teams and thus an ambush or two. We wanted to arrive as early as possible to avoi
d that. There was still one more task to complete before the race was over, so we hired a taxi that would take us to the safari place, wait the hour for us to finish the elephant ride, and then take us to Ya Nui Beach and the finish line. After a long time, and tough communication, we find the guy that would wait for us. We went to the safari place about 30 minutes early. But as soon as we got ther they said they would take us on our trek. Yes, that’s a 30 minute headstart. But wait, what’s that there? Yes, it’s a Tuk Tuk full of the Blue Team’s luggage. We were certain of it. That was definetly Kim Lynch’s bright yellow, rolling backpack! The tour guide told us that they had only left 4 or 5 minutes in front of us. After a ride to the top of the mountain, we hop out and get on our elephants. They had seats to sit on, which were wonderful…the last time I road an elephant I did it bareback and that wasn’t fun at all. We took off on our trek, trying ot enjoy the experience to the fullest.
After we came around a corner we heard some talking and laughing. It was the blue team. Our elephants were faster and catching up. By the time the trek was over, they were only a few feet in front of us. Perhaps they took to many pictures. But here was a problem. They were getting off the elephants in front of us and had waterbottles in hand. We were trapped and had no way out of this. We couldn’t jump off the top of an elephant to run away. Thankfully, the blue team mercifully waited for us to get off. They went ahead and got into their truck and road down the hill. Because we were early we didn’t get to see the elephant show, so we had to ask the tour guide to tell us the tricks that the elephants do to make our list. After we finished that we were in our truck and heading down the hill.
Now we are the “nerd team.” We know that the blue team won’t pass up the opportunity to drench us at the botttom of the hill as we pull up in our truck. It was a no brainer. But how do we escape that situation. I quikly thought on my feet. I looked at Gary and said, when we get to the road, jump out and wait on the side of the road. They won’t be able to drench us all if you are way down the street. So, as we pulled up to the road, Gary hopped out…much to the surprise of the tour guide. I looked at him and said, “Don’t worry about it, he’ll be fine. We just can’t all get wet.” Maybe he was still confused, oh well though.
As we turned off the road and into the parking lot, out from the bushes runs Chad, water bottle open. He face was gleaming with joy and he shouted, “Aha!” But then he saw that there were only three red team members in the back of that truck and immediately the glee wiped from his face, his lips drooped into a pout, and his water bottled lowered. Tauna came running up from the other side skirting sprinkles from her bottle saying, “Did we get ’em? Did we get ’em?” Then she too noticed that Gary was gone. We had outsmarted the blue team. They got into their Tuk Tuk and drove off. Our only hope now was to speed past them in our real taxi.
That was a problem though. Our taxi, the one that was supposed to wait for us… it wasn’t waiting. You’d think we’d just flag down another one really quickly and leave, but it wasn’t that easy. You see the next task required one team member, after arriving at the beach, to put on snorkle gear (acquired earlier), and swim out to an island. There that team member would retrieve a flag, wave it, and stop the clock fot that team. Along the way the swimmer had to note two different kinds of fish and bring back a simple description. Our taxi that had driven off, had Sarah’s snorkle gear in it. Now it was missing! Ahhh, what to do. We were hoping that the driver would return at 9:00 because the elephant ride was supposed to be an hour long. We formulated a new plan quickly. Sarah and I hopped in another taxi and drove off to the beach. We were going to acquire some snorkel gear close by the beach hopefully, and start the swim. Gary and Katherine would wait behind for the lost taxi driver, retrieve our rented snorkle gear so we could return, come to the beach, and then we could finish the race.
Sarah and I took off to Ya Nui Beach. There was another problem sprouting up… there were no snorkel shops close by. What would we do. Luckily our driver took us directly to the place we needed to go. We were sure the Blue Team was in front of us. When we arrived at the beach, to our
surprise there was no blue team. But the brown team and lime team were already there and finished with the race! Our friendliness with brown team payed off and they kindly let us borrow their snorkle gear. Sarah strapped into her flippers, put on her mask, got instructions from our host, and started the swim. I patiently waited for her to make it across the long swim, and for Gary and Katherine to return. My job was to make sure Sarah didn’t put her hand up for help and tell our host to go and get her on the surf board. (You know I couldn’t swim out there and save her!)
She got smaller and smaller as you swam the long route through the strong currents. I could barely see her as she got up out of the water and climbed on the rocks searching for the flag. Anna Marie was keeping time for the teams and she said, “Ashley, tell me when she waves the flag so I can stop the clock.” I looked at her sadly and said, “We can’t stop the clock, Gary and Katherine aren’t here yet, they are waiting for our runaway taxi!” As I watched Sarah climb out of the water, I heard shots from behind me, “They’re here Ashley, they’re here!” YES! As Sarah reached the flag, and jumped back in the water, our clock stopped. We had finished the race. Sarah made the long swim back, flag in hand, and as she reached the shore described the fish to our host. All tasks successfully completed, our team relaxed. Phew. What a couple of days.
The Brown Team outsmarted the rest of us, and got past some risky situations to win the race. They barely made it themselves to the elephants the first day, skipping the temple climpbing. They did all their internet research in town that night, ate dinner, and left to backtrack to the temple. They climbed it in the dark, and drove back to Phuket in the middle of the night. In the morning they still hadn’t eaten their bugs because they couldn’t find them the night before. So as they patiently waited on the beach at sunrise, they searched through trees and grass for live bugs! And that’s what they ate. Anita made the long swim and they clocked in first. Good for them. The Lime team clocked in second, we clocked in third, the Blue team got lost on the way to the beach and clocked in 4th, and the yellow team came in last. It was truly an amazing race with tons of interesting and gross things to do.
I’ll never forget the time I ate bugs in Thailand… even moreso the time I bought bugs in Thailand. What a trip.
