New Year at the Temple and Pineapple Butterflies

Last night, Soly had heard about a festival at a local temple. so six of us piled in a taxi and headed out. Many times in our ride across the island people said, "Do you think this is the right way?" "Is that the temple there?" At one point, the driver thought we wanted to go to a beach by a similar name! In the end we were dropped off at an entrance to a busy area of Chalong Wat. We walked and became part of the huge crowd of Thai people enjoying the kitch of all the stalls. From bras for 10 baht (about 30 cents) to cut bamboo filled with rice and lotus beans to small baby rabbit for sale complete with a little cage to keep your new pet... it all was for sale in stall after stall. One kind of food that we did see a lot of was fried insects as snacks!! How about some beetles, or some grasshoppers, or some cooked mealworm larvae? It is all popular with the Thai! Lots of loud music filled the air from stalls, from stage presentations with lots of glittering costumes and Thai instruments, to music near the hill of sand with incence and small flags of colored paper stuck into it.. with the thick smoke wandering in the air. Soly would have gotten the small beagle that she fell in love with.. but she is going back to Indonesia, so she settled on a necklace with her Marine boyfriend's name on it-Tigger. Even I could not resist looking through some of the clothes.. at about $6 for a skirt it was cheap enough. This festival is in celebration of Chinese New Year ( I find it a bit odd at the usually peaceful Buddhist temple!) and firecrackers are going off all over today and fireworks will light the sky later tonight for the finale. Mary and I wanted to leave earlier than the others as we were to go on a tour starting early in the morning, so we ambled out to where we hoped the entrance was.. and after winding our way through the many stalls and aisles of food we finally found an entrance with one of the motobike taxi guys ready to wisk us away to our hotel. First,... negotiation... we all agree on 200 baht and away we go through the night air. I was in the middle and Mary on the back. I always look ahead hoping that all goes well with the ride and grateful when we pull into the hotel parking lot. Mary had her shoe on the tailpile and the sole of her shoe melted! (Another trip to Big C for her!)

When I arrived at the hotel from my "home" of school in the morning, Nikki, our Thai guide for the morning, was there waving to me and motioning me to get into the van. We would be the only ones on the tour today and off we go.

First, to the waterfall and to see the gibbon project. Gibbons are shot by natives, kept in unkind ways as pets, used as props in tourist trips to name a few. They try to rehabilitate these animals that are brought to them and then put them back in the jungle if possible. The waterfall was fairly small at this time of the year because it is the dry season, but still a nice, quiet and cool spot. On to the elephant ride. This will be number 4 ride for me and it was a short one....for Mary, maybe her only one, and if you come to Thailand you should ride an elephant at least once! Next, the baby elephant! We fed him some of his 50 kilo per day food--some cucumbers (they are vegetarian--that is how they keep that slim figure!). Then onto the monkey show. Trained monkeys to do lots of little tricks.. like the "wai" of greeting here in Thailand, playing basketball, diving in water, twisting coconuts off a "tree" and picking a given small numbered board when given an English command. I really did not know how the guy did this one! He mixed them all up and had a kid from the audience come out and try to find a given number. The kid picked it last.. the monkey always picked whatever number he was asked first.. and the boards were mixed and face down! That impressed me! Onto a canoe ride! We drove through some rather littered back country roads to a rather polluted stream. At this point, I was thinking about how in the book they tell you NOT to be in fresh water as there are sometimes parasites in it. I thought about this and thought that there could be LOTS of other things in there too! Luckily! my body did NOT touch the water and we did see some scenery of mangrove with not too much pollution in our 30 minute canoe ride. (What can one expect on this very populated island of Phuket??) The lunch meal at the small restaurant in the middle of nowhere was the highlight! First, fried rice, then mussaman curry with chicken, potatoes and onions. This is my all time favorite dish in Thailand! Next cashews and chicken, and stir fried vegetables. I loved it that in the cashew and chicken dish the woman had cut the carrots into small hearts! and in the stir fried vegetables she cut them into flowers! Now that is attention to detail! For dessert- watermelon, chocolate candy, coffee, and pineapples shaped like BUTTERFLIES! And, of course, the dessert plate was decorated with the fushia and white orchids. I told the woman who was the cook how wonderful her meal was and we were off back to the hotel for a relax and some studying.