Alive and well

Hey all.

Last time I posted from Bangkok where I was feeling fairly miserable with a pretty gnarly head cold. So two days in Bangkok and all I did was lie around in my room and try to feel better. I met Angie Wednesday evening and we went to the town where she works as a teacher of 3rd graders at a private school. Luckily for me, one of her student's mothers is a doctor and Thursday morning we were able to get me checked out. I got referred to more of a head and sinus specialist and after he picked a few boogers out of my nose and I showed him the color of the phlegm I spit out he prescribed 5 different pills, all for just $10. I was actually feeling a little better in a general sense but I could definitely tell that my sinuses weren't getting better. The pills did the trick and I'm all better now. In fact, I was pretty much feeling fine by the time Angie and I went back into Bangkok so I decided to partake in an Ultimate Frisbee Hat tournament that Angie's team was hosting over the weekend. But before I get to that here are a few pictures of my first few days in Thailand, including a school trip to the National Science Museum with Angie's English program school kids.

Top floor of Suk 11, the guesthouse I was staying at in Bangkok

Angie and I caught a ride on the back of a scooter on the way back from a massage. I think we're looking pretty relaxed considering the transportation.

One of the kids wanted to carry my pack so I was more than willing to give up the burden. I think the look on his face says enough about the weight.

On the bus to the Science Museum. It was a two hour bus ride and the kids snacked non stop. It's pretty typical for Thai people to eat small meals all day long.

TECHNOPOLIS!!!! What a cool name!

The kids are having fun in a building demonstration.

Eating Mexican at Charlie Browns Friday night with several of the ultimate players. From the left back are Tuyet and Lin, then Tucker and Rob, Alpine and Angie, Shannon, and myself.

The swag (sweet ass gear) that we got for signing up for the tournament.

So, ultimate frisbee....never played it. I can through a frisbee ok backhanded but I've never gotten the hang of the forehand flick. But I had company. Ethan came into town Friday night and was game to participate over the weekend, so I had at least one other person with limited disc skills. All in all it was great fun. I was on a team with a couple of friends of Angie's from back home, Lin and Rob, both from the Seattle area, as well as bunch of other people from all over...even another Washingtonian and he happened to be a Cougar Alumni. The first day we pretty much sucked. Our record was 1-3 with a couple of pretty convincing losses. But it wasn't a one day tournament and we still had Sunday to pull it out. Going in we were ranked 9th out of the 10 teams but we played much better and made it to the final game in great style including a game we won coming back from a 0-6 deficit. I have to admit that I wasn't a big factor in our success but it was great fun playing and learning a new game. It also gave me a ton of respect for the game....not easy. Lots of sprinting and quite a bit of thinking. Maybe when I get back home I'll try it out on a regular basis. I only managed a couple of pictures from the tournament but there are a bunch more photos here:

www.pbase.com/carljohansvensson/hat_2007

The team photo totally sucks because my head is hidden behind Lin but there is one decent photo of me with the disc here:

http://www.pbase.com/carljohansvensson/image/74408254

And here are the few pictures I took.

It took us a while for team White to come up with a proper name, but by the second day we'd settled on Tightey Whitey

Rob and I. Rob grew up in Lake Stevens, close enough to the thriving metropolitan area of Marysville to consider him a neighbor.

White on Yellow action

Action between the blue and sky blue teams, or blue steel as they liked to call themselves.

It's definitely worth noting that we were playing on an Army base in Bangkok. Tons of dudes in camo parading around all day long.

The following day Ethan and I chilled out with a massage, got train tickets to Chiang Mai, and went to a few bars that night where we ran into an elephant, which is was sort of weird. We also ate at a place called Cabbages and Condoms, which had a unique theme.

Posing with one of the mannequins dressed in condoms at Cabbages and Condoms.

Great poster showing the do's and don'ts of safe sex.

Elephant amid the chaos of a strip of bars.

Sukhomvit Soi 11, my home street for my stay in Bangkok.

On Tuesday we made a quick tour of a couple of the main tourist spots in Bangkok Wat Pro and the Grand Palace before getting on our overnight train to Chiang Mai. Here are pics from the Bangkok excursion and one from the train.

The famous reclining Buddha. 46 meters long and 15 meters wide.

With some honkin' huge feet.

Misc images from around the Wats and the Palace.

At the palace they have a scale model of Angor Wat in Cambodia. I'll be visiting the real site in a couple of weeks.

On the train to Chiang Mai.

In Chiang Mai we met back up with Lin who is doing a similar bit as Ethan and I. She quit here job at Microsoft and has been traveling around since October coming from Europe and India. She has a good friend, Tuyet, who has been living in the Vietnam for the last year and a half and they are traveling together now. We wandered around town for a while and then Ethan and I hit up some local Muy Thai boxing. Pretty good stuff, but I had the distinct impression that it was mostly a club sort of thing and that the fights were primarily directed towards foreigners, especially since about 80% of the crowd were non-Thai. I think there were 7 fights and the pattern seemed to be two young kids, maybe 8-12, followed by some older guys, maybe 15-20. Ethan and I bet on four of the matches with even records, but unfortunately for him we bet 100 baht on each of the fights I won and 50 and 40 baht on the matches he won. Anyway here are a couple pictures from Chiang Mai and a pretty bad picture from the boxing matches, but a decent video.

Part of the market in Chiang Mai.

Bad Muy Thai picture. But this video is pretty good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvWNSMg1UZA

Lin had gotten the scoop from another friend of hers about a good 3 day hill tribe trek (http://www.chiangdao.com/nest/ht32ahilltribetrek.htm), so the four of us headed out Thursday morning for an awesome experience. We took a ride to the "base camp" at Chiang Dao Nest and had a great breakfast before spending most of the rest of the day hiking around the mountains to a super cool cave complex and a beautiful waterfall interspersed with lunch at a Lisu village. That night we stayed at an incredible village right on the hillside with a magnificent view of the mountains. We were with another couple of Americans, Angela and Mike, who were traveling for a week away from their jobs in the Air Force in Korea. The four of us, Ethan and I and Angela and Mike,burned the midnight oil with some fun discussion on politics and religion. I must say the beer definitely added a little fuel to the debate. Angela flies C-130s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-130_Hercules) and Mike is an Optometrist. Unfortunately they were only doing a two day hike so we split off from them the next morning. Here are some pictures from Chiang Mai and the first day of the hill tribe trek. BTW, if you're interested in really big planes, this site is pretty cool: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/design/q0188.shtml

One of our first views of the hills.

First village encounter. One of my favorite things about this tour is that we were the only westerners we saw until the final day.

Heading into the first cave. The hard hats came in handy considering the some of the tight spaces we had to squeeze through.

Cave

More cave.

We ran into this guy on the way back out. I didn't mess with him, but Mike flicked his tail around a bit, which sort of freaked me out.

Waterfall pictures. We had to hike up the creek to get there. Funny thing...along the way I was thinking to myself about how I'm a pretty sure footed guy. As you might have guessed, within 10 seconds of that thought I took a nice little plunge into the water.

This is the view from our hut the first night. It's pretty hard to beat.

Mike lending his assitance in giving the view a little bit of perspective.

The sunset wasn't bad either.

The second day was the most difficult as far as hiking went, but maybe the most rewarding experience wise. After hiking about an hour we made our first stop at a small village and hung out with a few of the locals for a while. Super cool. There was one old man that seemed to be the high man on the totem and he rolled a couple of hill ciggies for Ethan and I and gave us all bracelets, which he tied around our wrists with some type of ceremony. Originally we were told the bracelets were free but after there was some discussion and it was recommended to give them a few baht. I think we each gave 10 baht(~30 cents) which seemed to be plenty. There was also a cool lady that gave of some strange sour pickled veggie and convinced us to dance with her. Even those this was a guided trip, this was the type of experience that I'd looked forward to, chilling with locals. Very cool. And speaking of guides, we had two and only one of them could speak much English. Our next stop was another cave which was very deceptive from the outside. Just a small entrance lead into what was essentially a completely hollow mountain of rock. Inside parts of the ceilings must have been 70 feet high. There was someone living at the exit of the cave whom we had sort of heard about, but he wasn't there while we were visiting. Unfortunate, because he was apparently an interesting guy who lived with a bunch of cats. Soon after the cave visit, we stopped for lunch, an experience in itself. While one guide was cooking over a fire with the metal wok he'd brought along, the other guide made bowls and chopsticks out of bamboo for the four of us. Amazing. Just a couple of more hours of hiking through some pretty good up and down and we were at our next village for the night's stay. It was next to a river where we waded in, but felt a little strange about actually swimming right in front of the village especially since there was a guy doing his laundry and a lady that seemed to be taking a sort of a bath. Here are pics from the second day.

The next morning before the long hike.

Loads of pigs in the hills, but these were my favorite. A huge one next to a teeny one.

The head honcho.

Lin and I getting our groove on with our hostess.

She was lot more friendly than this picture indicated. I think it was customery for most of the hill people to put on a somber fave for picture opportunities.

The head honcho blessing Lin's bracelet. Here's a video of part of the process with Ethan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYeZMyj_h84

Parts of the trek were through massive bamboo forests.

The second cave we explored was very different than the one the day before. The first one was a maze of different passages with many tight squeezes. This cave was a little tight at the entrance, but then opened up to an immense cavern. I tried to get pictures but it was too big and my flash couldn't penetrate the darkness, so this picture is near the exit where I had a bit of natural light.

The view from th exit of the cave.

Here is one of our guides chopping up bamboo to make our lunch bowls.

And our chopsticks.

Lunch in the middle of the forest is a pretty nice affair.

Pretty cool bridge.

The village we stayed at on the second night

A view of the same village from the trail.

The final day was a shorter, but still challenging hike. We were met by a truck and drove back down the hills. We soon realized we'd done a large loop, but it would have been really difficult for any of us to realize that while we were actually out there. The first stop after trekking was an Elephant ride to another village. Tuyet and I were on one while Ethan and Lin were on the other. We both had "drivers", but Ethan and I both had the opportunity to ride the elephants on their necks. Quite an experience, especially when the one Tuyet and I were on decided that the young banana tree 20 feet off the path was exactly the snack he needed to keep him going. Definitely a bit startling for such a large beast to suddenly head a direction that was surprising to even the handler and then rip a 7 foot tree out of the ground and start munching on it. But I guess you don't argue too much with a hungry elephant. The ride ended in another village, but this one was definitely geared for tourists a lot more. The other villages we'd visited had some goods for sale but there was virtually no hard sell. Not the case with these villages closer to civilization. This village had a bunch of stalls selling pretty much the same things in each. We were the only four prospective buyers there so we sort of felt obligated to at least look at each vendors wares. We all ended up buying something, but not too much. From there we walked about an hour to another village where the "aggressive" seller were. We were warned by both the lady at the Chiang Dao Nest and our guide that they would be pretty forward. It wasn't as bad as it could of me and it was sort of funny see all these ladies running at us yelling "50 baht! 50 baht!" or "10 baht! 10 baht!" Ethan seemed to be a magnet for them as they kept on hounding him the most. One lady was offering a hat to him for 200 baht, but within 30 seconds had lowered her price to 30 baht. I'm not so sure that's good salesmanship. I think Ethan was really considering but he realized he had no interest whatsoever and managed to avoid the hard sell. Our next and final leg of the trek was a ride down the local river on cool bamboo rafts. Two of us on each raft with a guide each. In sort of turned into a race since we were helping to punt the rafts down the river. It was fun and some decent exercise, but it was really great to see the locals that were hanging out at the riverside or fishing. Here are pictures from our third day of the trek.

One of our guides.

Yahoo! Elephant rides!

Ethan and Lin on their beast

We bought some sugercane and occasionally the elephant would curl his trunk back in search of some sugary goodness.

Ethan perched pecariously on the neck of his elephant.

Just like riding a bull.....

Maybe my favorite picture so far.

And here is a short, lower quality, video of riding the elephant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsOxMzAgZoQ

Heading out onto the river for our raft trip.

Punting past some kids. And here is a video of us:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpzOXRsfhNM

and more kids.

The end of the journey.

And I thought I'd throw in another flower picture.

Yesterday was Tuyet's 28th birthday so the four of us plus a friend of a friend of Tuyet's, a local girl, went to a nice restaurant right on the river. Great place and we even got our groove on a little bit to the house band that did an outstanding job with their cover renditions. Way, way, way better than the cover band we'd heard a little earlier while getting massages. Those guys may well have been the worst cover band ever. Ever. They even made me question whether the massage did anything to relax me:-)

And now Ethan and I are on are way to Luang Prabang in Laos. We're catching a mini-bus to the border today and taking a slow boat, 2 day, trip down the Mekong. We booked the trip here, so hopefully our accomdations for tonight and our boat are of decent quality.

I have no idea what internet access will be like in Laos and Cambodia so it may be a while before I post again.

Peace and good happiness to everyone.