Khanom......

We have been living the good life here in Khanom. Our job pretty much pays us nothing (about $100 a week for between the two of us) but we are living in air conditioning for free, have free great Thai food, and a beach to play on each day. We have learned more Thai this month than in all the months we’ve been here combined and have read a lot. I just finished “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” by Marina Lewycka. It’s a pretty funny book. Codie just finished “The Brothers K” by David James Duncan for the second time. Great book if you’ve never read it.
The beach here is nice but there are jellyfish once and a while so we are constant alert. Two days ago Codie almost had a heart attack while looking in the water until she realized it was just her arm. They also have pink dolphins that we usually see swimming by once a day. They look like they should be swimming in a Disney movie or at least be on a birthday cake from a supermarket.
As summer in the U.S. is getting started we’re especially missing hanging out with the Eugene crew in beautiful Oregon. One downfall to where we’re at is that April in Thailand is like eating red curry on the sun. It’s soooooo hot so I actually spend all the time Codie is teaching in our room writing, playing guitar, and reading while we usually go out and do things in the late afternoon. Oh yeah, we also play a lot of Catan.
We have a motorbike out here which has been super fun and allowed us to explore other beaches, waterfalls, etc. It has no speedometer though so it's anyone's guess how fast we are cruising around but we get passed a lot so we're guessing it's within legal limits.
Having my guitar here on the beach has also forced me to learn how to play the following songs: Zombie—by the Cranberries, Winds of Change- by the Scorpions, and Hotel California- by the Eagles. There is a serious lack of current music that Thai people request around a bonfire on the beach. I can't wait to showcase these hits back in Oregon. Wishing everyone well.

Rab Yang Sai...the Education Vacation

Codie and I have been teaching the past few weeks at Rab Yang Sai resort in Khanom, Thailand. It's on the beach. It's beautiful. We love it. The staff is half Thai and half Burmese. We hang out a lot even when we;re not teaching. F-U-N!

Songkran is Thai New Year. It is a water festival in which people go around and throw water at each other. Regular water, colored water, ice water (Brrrrr....) and smear colored paste on each other's faces. It's a lot like Holi in Nepal. We spent the day getting doused on our bicycles before we met up with some friends with a pick-up. We cruised Talad Mai, now armed with a tank of water and buckets, in the annual water war.

Leaving the festival. Cow eating trash. There was no decernable organized sanitation system from what we saw in KTM. The smell of burning garbage is a frequent smell.

This is soooo Lagaan

The Maoists wanted us to know that they like us. I'm sure they also wanted the local people to know it's sure not thier fault there has been a huge drop-off of tourism since the US government declared an advisory due to Maoist activities throughout the country (it has since been listed for everywhere we went since they are now a big part of the government).

So here we are to see, Kumari, the world's only living Goddess. She is selected and installed in this temple at around 4 years and then gets booted after she reaches maturity (see health class for details). To figure out who is the next Kumari, people search for a little girl who has the characteristics of Kumari. Then, after they weed it down to a bunch, they put all of the little girls in a scary room with 99 severed buffalo heads, scary music, and demon-like masked dancers. The REAL Kumari doesn't get scared. True.
Every once in a while she pops her head out of the golden window and people get to see her. We had no such luck. She is a big deal at all the festivals, though, where she gets pulled around by this giant chariot.

Drive-by praying.....

Notice the "drive-by" shrine. People would touch it, make a blessing, and ring the bell as they biked or drove by. Talk about efficient......

Temples!

A the temples and shrines have bells by them, whether they are big or small. People hit the bells to wake up the god or goddess so they can hear their prayer or offering.
Religion is everywhere! I've never been to a place where spirituality was so much a part of peoples' daily lives. A motorcycle can be parked next to a temple, kids can jump on statues out front, you can set up a ping-pong table, etc... no biggie.

The third picture are people doing their pujas, or offering to the gods at the particular temple.

The fourth picture: Buddhist prayer wheels surround the temple with Hindu Gods. You walk around the temple clockwise and flick the wheels as you go by chanting (if you want) Om Mani Padme Hum.

Fifth picture: Same temple. You can buy some flowers and red & yellow paste, you put some on the god and then it is made holy. You then bring the paste (often mixed with rice) home and bless your family with it. They should be good to go for the day. Many women do this every morning for their families or you can just go solo.

Thamel

Thamel--the tourist bubble inside of KTM. Anybody need knockoff Northface gear, singing bowls, or stripped hippy MC Hammer pants that are somehow cool in the backpacker world of Nepal?
We landed in Kathmandu. Popcorn / lentil vendors were a favorite snack in the city.

Teeth!

We got to this section of the city with teeth themed stores everywhere. Lots of "dentists" in candle lit cave-like shops on the side of the road.
There was a shrine(?) if you need a little luck from the gods to help your teeth (of course in the teeth section of the old city). You hammer a coin on or just touch it as you walk by. A lot of people were touching this thing.

Kayaking next to corpses.....three days down the Kali Gandaki

We spent three days northwest of Pokara rafting down the Kali Gnadaki. Although it was not the 4+ rapids they promised it was an amazing trip down a river filled with canyons, villages, the occasional rapid, and, oh yeah, funeral pyres where ashes go straight into the river. It was pretty surreal to be in a kayak with a burning body a few feet away.
The trips highlight was spending the night on a beach by a village where kids came down for a photo shoot and volleyball game before bed time.

It's a bird...it's a plane.....it's a festival.....it's a weird day

After coming down from the mountain....heroic and hurting (seriously....after carrying that backpack on my hips for two weeks I feel like a twelve year old German Shepherd) we arrived back in the lakeside town of Pokara where we started the day learning how to fly and ended it looking like a Fraggles that had been attacked by Grateful Dead fans carrying spray paint.

By flying....I mean paragliding. Paragliding made me feel like a 3 year old discovering the swings for the first time. You latch yourself in (or your parents do...in this case it was my paragliding instructor), there is very little explanation as to what is going to happen (actually..absolutely no instruction from my tandem rider), you gain some momentum (a push.....or as in the case of paragliding you run like a rabid gazelle off a cliff) and spend the remainder of the ride with your mind in a cocktail of fear, elation, the giggles, and wondering how in god's name you will be able to stop this thing. The ride lasted about a half hour where your eyes dart from the land below, to the other parachutes in the sky, to your own chute--praying all the ropes are made of really, really strong material and don't run into each othe tangling up into a dive bombing mess. It literally takes your breath away though, to see the Annapurna mountain range in the background with the sky speckled with ballooning human birds floating in the thermals next to hawks and vultures. As one can imagine, epic "Planet Earth-esque" music was playing in my head as we flew over the hills. When we got to the lake, however, the soundtrack shifted to Swedish death metal as the instructor asked me if I wanted to try some aerobatics. We cruised over the water (actually...not quite over the water - somewhere between the water and land which was sooooo not cool) and he instructed me to follow all his commands. Throwing my body form side to side we proceeded to start a slow spiral before blending into a gyroscope that caused that mornings Masala Tea to pitch forward to the back of my throat. Just when I though all was lost and we would black out (I've heard pilots do when they hit equally high spinning speeds) we landed with a quick pillowy brake. Not dead. I repeat....we did not die. Yay! After we landed and explored the next level of the sport, parahawking, where you do the same thing with a hawk tied to your wrist to help find the thermals we fly in. Maybe next time.
As we drove back into the city we started to see more and more bikers coming by who appeared to have gotten into severe accidents that caused them to bleed rainbows. Were we witnessing the Carebear armageddon? Not quite, as we saw line after line of children, armed with buckets, waterballoons, and squirt guns fully loaded with multicolor dye. Holi had started. Holi is the yearly color festival in Nepal and India. We heard three different stories of how it was started involving three different gods but we have no clue which one was right. All in all, it's a day to have fun smearing dye, throwing water, and dropping colored powder on your friends and family. It was a bit like Halloween only no candy and the people make your costume for you. It was, universally, fun.
Three hours later we were drenched, painted, and still giggling.

Trek-tacular!

We got back from our 10 day trek in 9 days because we're fast. That's right...fast. Our legs hurt, our knees really hurt, our feet are sore and we both lost weight. That trek was pretty hardcore for us. We actually went up to the Annapurna Base Camp right after an unusual late spring snowfall. We kept passing people that had turned back because the relatively warm weather was causing avalanches and the pass to the base camp wasn't safe. We got to the avalanche area one day after people started hiking up again. Supposedly most of the avalanches had already happened and they don't happen until 10:30 am or later (we were told). We actually saw a big avalanche across the canyon from the safety of our guesthouse the night before we headed to the base camp. They are so loud and crazy!
Even with this apparent harbinger of our impending death, we went with about 15 other people at 6:00 am and had to walk over avalanche after avalanche, which is really tough walking in tennis shoes and six dollar boots (that didn't break until the last day...Yay!) :). Right at the start Codie slipped on a rock into a creek soaking her left foot. SInce we're a little freaked about avalanches we're practically jogging up the mountain and then "rumble, rumble, crack" an avalanche happened about 20 minutes behind us on the trail. It turns out it was pretty small (by avalanche standards) and mostly the dust hit the actual trail where people were. Two British guys were right where it happened, were scared silly, and ran back to the guesthouse with their porter and guide (we found this out later and were wondering why the 2 British kids never made it up to base camp).
Walking up on this trek is like walking with a family, you pass the same people, they catch up with you at night, you talk about where you're headed and end up getting to know the people on the same trek as you. So the British kids freaked everybody out that was coming up on the hike, rumors spread like wildfire that no one could go up to base camp (only the crazy Korean group came during this time. Seriously Koreans are hard core. Every group we met were decked out in mountain gear and owning the mountain). Meanwhile, we were chilling in a winter paradise at 13,550 ft (The peak of Mount Hood is 11,249 feet), the sun was shining, we're in t-shirts, and the food at the guest house is unreal. We were sitting at the base camp at the world's 7th tallest peak (Annapurna 1) and surrounded by a sanctuary of other mountains. Sweet.
We left the next morning at 6:00 am, hiked back across the avalanches and this time I completely bit it in the creek where Codie fell and both my feet went in the water. I curled up into a fetal position on some rocks and saved the rest of my body from getting really wet and cold but had the pleasure of hiking with wet sock for the next three hours. It was actually funny because we were going down at that point but not too funny since I had "wet sock". Those of you who know me know there are three things I loath: dolphins, men in capri pants (that means you, David Wood), and wet socks. We made it back last night and went out to dinner and ran into all kinds of people from the trek.

As if that isn't enough adventure, tomorrow we are going to go paragliding!!! Don't worry too much we are going tandem with an instructor. How cool is that? You can see the Himilayas as you float down for a 1/2 an hour. Tomorrow is also Holi--a huge festival here (google it and look at the pictures--tourists are huge targets during the water/color fight). ON the 11th,12th, and 13th we are going rafting on the Kali Gandaki River were cremation pyres are burning on many of the curves and intersections of the river (it's nicknamed the holy river). So, we won't be very good bloggers over the next couple of days. Later!

Annapurna ho!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, after spending the last two days in Pokhara Codie and I are ready to venture forth into the great (kind of-sort of) unknown of the Annapurna mountain range. We checked our trekking ability earlier on this trip outside of Kathmandu an I realized that $6 hiking boots from a vendor in Thailand will fall apart after three days (seriously...both pairs no longer are attached to the soles without the expert stitching of Nepali shoe repair employees). Codie realized the painful lesson of hiking with a pack in flip flops for a day, and we both ditched half the junk we brought on our first excursion for this length of our trip. We are heading up ten days to the Annapurna Base Camp (that's where the real hard core people keep going to the top...we are not hardcore). It's not Everest but there is snow and it's far. We're excited to exist on a steady diet of Dahl Baht (Lentils and rice with seasoning) for the next few days and to really get into the Nepali mountain range.
Pokhara is a Nepali tourist town with a great mountain view but we managed to beat the crowds today by renting bikes and boats and rowing out in the lake to watch the sunset as devotees hired boats to visit the island's Hindu temple. We didn't go to the temple but we did rock out to the sounds of Tibetan monks singing Nepali pop songs from the boat close to ours. Check back with you in 10 days! Happy March!

Shiva's Birthday + Tibetan New Year = Busy Day

A few days ago Codie and I were staying at a Tibetan Monastery in Kathmandu that was situated next to one of the biggest stupas (Buddhist pointy thingies that are supposed to hold the relics of a Buddha (an enligthened person).....or in this case THE BUDDHA...and by relics, I mean bones. This one may have a toe, a finger, a ribcage. Who knows?) in the world. The place was peaceful, beautiful, and had the best alarm clock in the world. Starting at 3am the monks were in the main hall chanting, playing drums, and blowing on incredibly long copper horns (I'm talking long, like two people need to hold one, long). While this was quite a way to wake up, it was also really early and lasted all morning long. When we finally got up to see if this was an everyday occurrence or whether we were just the lucky two who got the all night show, we found out that, surprise, it was the last day of the celebration of Losar, Tibetan New Year, and we were invited to spend the afternoon celebrating. There are a lot of refugees here in Nepal and the Bouddha area of Kathmandu is an especially thriving Tibetan community. Crazy enough, we were at the monastery because it was within walking distance of another festival Mahashivaratri, SHiva's Birthday, which was being celebrated at Pashupatināth, the biggest SHiva center in Nepal.
So....we made a day of it. We spent 3 hours at the monastery as monks danced in elaborate outfits, that were like nothing I have seen--a cross between a witch hat and a royal outfit, as other monks in yak fur hats that resembled Spartan warriors watched on. The dancer would pick up different objects to be offered as Puja (Ritual offerings) and spin around with them gracefully. This lasted two hours before two guys with orange masks came out and ran away with an obscene cake featuring a depiction of the male anatomy that looked like it had been molded with feces. I didn't get it, but after they scurried away with the demon cake we all went outside and threw everything in a haystack (all while still doing the circle dance mind you) and then lit everything on fire. My kind of party!
It was late afternoon at this point and although the Tibetan monks threw one heck of a shindig, we still wanted to make it over to Shiva's Birthday party. That's when things got out of control. There were home made toll booths on the way down that kids had set up and made us pay to pass or we would suffer the wrath of their water balloons. A dollar fifty later, we reached the temple grounds.....and so did about 400,000 other Shiva devotees. We became part of the great flow, past the traditional singers and the eight year old rocking out on the drums, past the naked holy man dancing below us, past the crazy monkeys who kept trying to eat my popcorn, and ended up on a bridge watching funeral pyres burn over the river while talking to a group of men who wanted to explain the intricacies of Hinduism in broken English. All in all, a great day to explore two faiths living la vida loca.

Namaste or should I go?

C and C Thai factory is taking a little hiatus from the Land of Smiles to visit the land of Chai tea, mountains, and living goddesses. Thailand is entering the Hot, hot season and it's summer vacation for the kids (I know, I know, I get two summer vacations this year. So not fair). We took off Monday to Kathmandu, Nepal and are going to be here for a month before heading back to Thailand where we will spend the rest of our summer break touring Thailand and teaching English in a small coastal area for a month before school starts again.
Kathmandu is a place I am already feeling is beyond my capacity as a writer and photographer to adequately describe. I keep feeling like I am a character in a movie watching the city go by.
LONGSHOT- An airplane is landing in the Kathmandu airport. We see our two travelers going across the tarmac.
MEDIUM SHOT- They get closer and we can see they are tired form the 10 hour train ride and 4 hour flight. We follow them into the airport. The VISA room is about the size of a VFW in Northern Wisconsin and smells like one too. Sixties carpeting and stale cigarette smoke overtake the senses.
CLOSEUP- travelers faces as they wait for an hour for the Visa workers to process the line of Visa (not because of the length of the line but because the Visa worker flirts with every girl going through the line and pauses after every stamping to laugh and talk to the other Visa employees).
CUT TO TRAVELLERS OUTSIDE THE AIRPORT. They are getting into a tiny car and are getting their first glimpses of the city.
CLOSE UP on dropped mouths.
LONG SHOT-The camera now follows their eyes as they slide down the mountain hill into the valleys of Kathmandu. The background noise is overwhelming with motorbikes honking and large trucks and buses honking customized horns like ringtones. They drive down a mix of gravel, sand, and paved roads. As they drive we see the city from the side window. It is always dusty to the point where some images seem to be in in sepia tones. A woman cutting a half carcass of a buffalo in a a cave like shop about the size of a closet. Not even room to stand. We drive pass open door passages that give a glimpse of a stupa inside. The next doorway has kids, an undetermined age, playing cricket in a Hindu temple the wicket barely missing the top of a stupa. Outside the doors are another group of teenagers shooting marbles with the looks of hard faced gamblers in Las Vegas betting it all. We drive past a cart selling popcorn and roasted nuts in bags made out of old test papers from the university. We see a group of Nepali teens holding hands and laughing as they make their way down the sidewalk. A thousand pigeons suddenly shoot up in front of the car blurring the images ahead. We see 17 cars, bikes, trucks, motorbikes, old ladies, children, and dogs all heading toward the same point in a roundabout.
CLOSEUP- The shock on the travelers faces that no one has been hit, sideswiped, or trampled.
FADE TO BLACK
More to come....