My First Trip to Thailand

from the journals of Andy, our one-man Student Services department. Visit his homepage and read about his thoughts and experiences about Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Greece at http://fromtheendoftheworldtoyourtown.com/.

December 28, 2000
The Thai Kingdom....(One of?...)

The best way to describe this place, after you get over the fact it is more or less indescribable, is to say it is a land of contrasts, but even that is too much of a cliche. One day you are in a cosmopolitan, international city, like Bangkok, having Western food, or just sitting eating at one of the street corner cafes that serve fabulous Thai noodles and rice for 30 baht (about 80 cents US), a day later, or even just a few hours later, you are trekking in total jungle surroundings, or jamming your bamboo pole into a riverbed, trying to avoid crashing your raft into a rock out-jutting that is coming up at you faster than you can breath in some very fast water indeed. Then, a few hours in the back of a dusty pickup truck later, your body is being twisted and contorted in a thousand directions, and you here bones crashing, and it takes a second or two before you realize they are your bones, and it is OK, as they are probably going back where they were supposed to be.

While we were out there struggling, deep in Trekker's country, walking our hearts out and breathing heavy in the steeply pitched mountainous jungle, our guide kept telling us, "you trek, you very tired, you go back Chiang Mai, you get traditional Thai massage, you feel like man again." At this point he pushed his chest forward and inhaled deeply.

The guy who guided our group was hilarious. The trek part of the trip took us deep into a small jungle village North of Chiang Mai, then the next day we spent about three hours on the elephants, after which we did maybe three hours of bamboo rafting in some moderate, to very fast, water. Well, we came around this one spot, which was kind of like an obstacle course of rocks and outcroppings of shoreline, with a hairpin turn or three thrown in for good measure. We hit a couple of rocks, at one point all of us going down and our guide having to unhook the front of the raft from a rock on which we had become stuck. ………………

Now, three years later, I am teaching here. A lot of places, the more you know about them, the more you start to become disenchanted: Not here, I love it more and more everyday!