We're now into our last week in Mae Sot, and I'm just starting to get unpacked... We've spent the last two weekends trying to see some of the nearby towns, namely Chiang Mai (which is hardly a town as much as it is a city larger than Adelaide) and Sukhothai.
The weekend before last saw us in Chiang Mai, where we went with a couple of British medical students. We'd been out the night before seeing off John Melino (a fellow FMC student), and two of the poms (Pete and Mike) drank into the morning as if they weren't taking a bus ride through a mountain range the next day. Unfortunately for them, reality hit with a jackhammer to the brain and stomach a few hours later. I have to say I was very impressed with their fortitude to have survived the journey without using the vomit bags in front of them, though they did make full use of the toilet breaks!
Our first night in Chiang Mai consisted of Pete, Mike and myself heading out to see some muay thai kickboxing, while Kelly and Iris explored the night markets. I hadn't expected the chance to see any Thai kickboxing, so I was pretty stoked when the opportunity presented itself. I wasn't disappointed in it at all; although I didn't see any really amazing acrobatics it was a thoroughly entertaining evening punctuated by an appropriate number of cringe-worthy moments. The greatest of these was probably when they blindfolded four fighters and set them free in the ring to hit whatever moved. The referee seemed perfectly happy with this, even while they were getting king-hit repeatedly in the back of the head. Not that the referee got away unscathed himself...
Our second day there was spent at an elephant nature park, which was one of those amazing experiences I don't ever quite seem able to enjoy as much as I know I ought to. It was lucky I had Kelly next to me, delirious in a manic joy that only a girl surrounded by giant, tusked, trunked mammals could ever know. It was a beautiful day, where we fed, swam with, washed and hung out with 31 huge Asian elephants in a valley topped with mist so that the whole time it seemed like it wasn't quite real. And Kelly rested well that night, despite sleeping on a slab of uneven concrete masquerading as a mattress.
That was basically our experience of Chiang Mai, we'll be seeing Pete and Mike again in Kathmandu, as by some freak of circumstance they are making their way there for an elective at the same time that we do.
A longer journey but a shorter story. After a chaotic but successful attempt to secure some seats in a packed minibus bound for Sukhothai, we were nearly smeared on the bitumen like canned sardines on toast by our maniacal driver. He seemed intent upon making up time lost on the up-slopes by flooring it on the down-slopes, irrespective of the camber of the road, the lane he happened to be in, or the presence of opposing traffic. Somehow the speedometer readings which I took at regular intervals were no consolation, since the arrow mocked me by bouncing limply between 0 and 5km/hr when we were clearly in excess of 100 and gaining rapidly on a fully laden truck.
Fortunately, the destination was a nice hotel run by a pleasantly dementing Italian and his wife. The weather was very hot due to a lack of rain and cloud cover, and we spent a proportion of our time lounging in or by the pool at the hotel during the middle of the day.
For historical understanding - Sukhothai itself was the first capital of what could be recognised as modern day Thailand (though it was known then as the Sukhothai Kingdom). Before 1238, Sukhothai was a part of the Khmer Empire, if you remember them, and it formed as the Khmer Empire crumbled under its own weight. The new empire expanded by aligning itself with nearby kingdoms... using Theravada Buddhism as the state religion in order to gain the impetus required to do this. The ruins at Old Sukhothai show the importance of this religion in the time of this kingdom, and they are in a much better state of repair than those at Angkor (even if they are tiny in comparison, and lack the same character on the whole). Anyway, we explored them by day and night and enjoyed ourselves mostly.
The next day, I ventured off to a nearby waterfall and cave with some of the others we went with, but Kelly wasn't game to come along, as we went by motorbike. Neither were overly spectacular, but it was fun to practice motorbiking on some almost deserted roads. Viewing the countryside at our own pace, and stopping for pictures when we desired, was nice.
I guess that's that. We leave in a few days, and it'll be sad to go. We've met lots of really nice people, and done a lot of really awesome stuff. But Nepal awaits... I just hope the flooding up there stops sometime soon!
Many thanks to all who have contributed to Kelly's unofficial "Stock The Karen Kids' School" fund! We did some shopping today and bought them a much needed CD player, as well as some CDs, new toys, soap, stationary, and a pump for the soccer balls that one of the guys staying here decided he wanted to donate.
I hope to have internet access in Nepal, but who knows what things will be like. I'm sure we won't have wireless broadband, that's for sure. Don't forget to look at our photos again, there are some great photos of the elephants and the ruins at Sukhothai.
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