Fantastic temple complex’s (there are many). Something about heads and loosing them perhaps?  The third picture is the result of me telling the family this is formally the last temple we’ll visit…. (yes, that gets smiles!)

Nice hotel – and the old Capital for Thailand -with nice historic places…. somewhat a reminder of Angkor Wat

our private place, rooms slide open straight to the pool…. very nice!

Hey everyone.
We went to an amazing cooking class here in Thailand. It was great fun. We got to go to the farm so we also looked at the ingredients we used while they were in the tree.

If this interests you and you wish to have more information  about this event make sure to check out my food page.

While we were on our bike tour, we stopped at many amazing places and did amazing things. These include riding on elephants, swimming in a waterfall, and going on a boat. The waterfall was beautiful. The water down lower was very shallow but under the waterfall my father could not find the ground. We had fun just splashing, or swimming against the current. We also went under the waterfall. We at first looked to see if there was anywhere behind the waterfall where the water would not hit you. The answer is there was not though in those few minutes we had our backs water blasted. Also, most people say that if you get close to a rainbow it will just go farther away so you can never touch it. Well, under the waterfall between my head and the rocks were two of them. These of course are just caused by the diffraction of the light in the water but wherever the diffraction occurred but my hand passed over it so I can claim that I touched a rainbow.

Before we left Vienna, I asked Milla (my friend who came from Thailand) what I should do in Thailand. She answered that I NEEDED to ride on an elephant. So I asked mom and dad if we could ride an elephant, and that is ONE of the thing we did. The only thing is I never learned the name of our elephant. So we made some up.

Mom and I rode on Elly Phant, and dad and Leendert rode on El ly Phant (there brother and sister). To start off, we went 10 meters to the right of the end of the place where they kept the elephants and turned into a little path only large enough to fit the elephant’s large feet, it was going uphill. Normally you would say “sit back and enjoy the ride” but in this case, if you would sit back you would be scared to fall backwards!

                                                                                 Elly

                                                                                     El

Of course, what goes up must come down, so guess what we did. CORRECT (I hope), we went down the hill. At the bottom of that hill, there was a banana plantation. At one point, mom, dad, Leendert and me were scared that our elephants were going to walk over the grass to the banana trees.

When we got back to the street, we went down a tiny path that lead to the water. You got it, the elephants wanted to cool down so water went into the trunk and ‘Elly’ and ‘El’ spat all over their body’s which caused us to get wet. Getting wet actually felt nice after biking for 2-3 hours in 42C°.

We finished by going on the road again. Going from the river to the place where we had started, there was an exhibit type of thing (a cage) with a snake that was about 2-3-4 times my hight and thicker than my/your hand! The reason why the length is so, not very precise is because he/she was all twisted and turned.

THANKS MILLA!!!

So, we have done part one of Bangkok – today we flew up to Chiangrai. Great trip: uneventful!  Looks like they have a lot of rice growing here!