Tour of Suan Long Kong, Werachai's farm, and my former residence

Werachai’s farm grows more fruits than I can name and several of them, I’ve never seen before in my life. On the farm sits three lakes (two fresh, one saltwater), rubber tree fields, a greenhouse and a large terraced hill they call a mountain. In the back of their pickup truck, we toured the farm with Werachai and his best best friend Wiset as tour guides. Here, I am eating a tiny little fruit the size of a marble that first assults the taste buds with a striking sourness, then dries out your tongue with intense bitterness.

Adding to the farming business, Werachai has plans to make a eco-resort out of his land. He’s already built one impressive hand-built bungalow and has begun to clear the mountain for bungalows with panoramic views on both the Andamen sea and the coastal mountains. This picture is of our tour of the resort's main office that’s being built by the workers on the farm when it’s not fruit picking season. Their on-off building schedule makes the construction an extremely slow process, but none of them seem to mind: they have a vision.

In the back of the pick up, Ron and Linda with the master carpenter. In the back ground are the fruit trees, deliberate rows of different fruit trees growing together.

Here's one of the fresh water lakes on the farm. Behind me is their irrigation pump watering to most of the property. The floating "bridge" is sturdier than it looks.

Werachai picking some strange bell-shaped fruit with a large cashew-like nut growing out of its core. The fruit is a mix of a peach and a juicy apple. Behind us are betel nuts drying in the sun. When they’re totally dry, they’ll peel off the husks and sell the nuts to Burma and Northern Thailand. Betel nut is that red stuff old Thai people chew and let the red stain their teeth and drool down their chin. It’s gross but they seem to like it. We didn’t get to try any.

In the greenhouse there were only a few flowers in bloom. My mother wished she could have grown the same plants back at Michigan.

Werachai showing off his big wood. It’s number two, behind teak, he said.

The tour took us to another garden of flowers grown to sell and to the so-called mountain.

Behind us is his farm, almost extending out to the bright white Andaman sea. Up here is where he plans to hand build bungalows.

Down to the villages surrounding the farm, we stop by a fishing community. Most of the other boats out at sea, but there was one man in his boat painting the bow.

It was low tide at the time and all these boats will float once the water comes back. Except for the green one in the distance, still wrecked from the tsunami.

Werachai shows us the tsunami evacuation plan. Signs are posted all over the coast directing people to safe areas in case the sirens warn of another tidal wave.

We stopped at several houses in the village and this guy’s yard was the cleanest I’ve ever seen in Thailand. I’m pretty sure he sweeps his dirt yard everyday. Every other yard was a mess, an example of local entropy. The man sat on his porch weaving thatch roofing that he sold for 7 baht a piece. He said he averaged making 50-60 a day.



Floating fish farms in the village. We didn't brave the walk out to get a closer look.

After lunch we drove out to a coastal national park for a walk on the beach. The sun was so hot I felt like it was burnt the second it touched me. We made it a short walk and went back to the shade.

In a couple months it will be my parents 25th wedding anniversary. If you haven’t bought them a present and a card yet, you better get a move on. Ron would like a new airplane and my mom wants a waterfall built in the back yard.

Me and the family. Wiset, Werachai and Noot. I was pooped. What a great day.

The Folks Come to Thailand

Welcome to Bangkok. Get in this boat and hold on. Don’t leave your mouth open and let river water splash in your mouth, it will make you sick. Keep your hands clear from the edges, don’t lean over to far, and be weary of wayward props.
The construction of a new wat somewhere in the middle of all the "klongs" or canals. Ron claims they have more sophisticated ways of building these days but I know he asked me to take a picture of this wat so he could go back to work and duplicate their state of art scaffolding.
Bangkok’s actually like Venice. Much of it is on water, where boat travel through the klongs is the norm. Thailand’s version of a city built on water is interesting but nowhere near as romantic. No gondolas navigated by guys in striped shirts with big oars; the Thai longtail boats are rigged up with loud engines spinning elongated props, swinging dangerously behind the boat.
Wat Pra Keow. The holiest of holy Thai temples. Home to the Emerald Buddha and a piece of the Buddha’s collar bone. This shot was at the recommendation of our goofy but informative tour guide that hustled us around the wat giving information and directions so quickly we just followed her around and did as we were told.
The Italian gold-tiled chedi housing the collar bone of the Buddha. As our tour guide explained, naughty visitors to the wat pick at the tiles trying to five-finger discount an expensive souvenir.
Tiled roof in the Wat. The tour guide said nothing about this. I just thought it was a cool picture.
A mythical Thai monkey demon or something of the likes. A mythical creature of Thai lore that protects...well, protects someone good. Or was that half-lion, half man?

Half-lion, half-man standing in the wat. Again, I'm not positive about this. But if this thing got in a fight with the thing above it, I'd take the monkey demon, any day.

This guy is guarding some wing of the Grand Palace only accessible to women. Again, our tour guide insisted we get a picture with him. I couldn't help wondering what the guy would have done if while posing for the picture, I just turned around and took off through the door where men are forbidden.

What the hell am I doing posing for a picture with my hand like that? It's a Thai pose that is supposed to, well, be handsome I guess. I've never really understood it and never really asked anyone "why do you do that?" Instead, I just picked it up and do it whenever we've already taken too many pictures and need to do something to shake it up a bit.
Wat Pho, Thailand’s biggest reclining Buddha. We walked the short distance from Wat Pra Keo and some Thai tuk tuk driver told us it was closed so he could take us on a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride tuk-tuk tour of Bangkok for a sucker’s price. What a dick.
Taraneh joins us for drinks on the river. Ron’s drinking coffee to combat his jet lag, Taraneh and I are drinking beers, her to drowned her nerves of meeting my parents and me to test what Beer Singha tastes like on tap.
Fine wine at a hotel way too nice for either of us to be in. But wevacted civil enough to fool everyone there. Then again, even I'm refined enough to know that those wine glasses are way to big. Those are some kind of joke. They are conducive to generous pours though...
Time to win some prizes for the girlfriend. Too bad I suck at darts. What's 20 Baht anyways? Needless to say I didn't win a thing. The prizes were crappy anyways.
Out to dinner at a restaurant along the Chao Phrya river. Thai style food, Thai style shirts, Thai style photos.
The three of us hungry since we didn't find anything 'a-roy' to eat at the market.

A brief glimpse of life as a backpacker in the south of Thailand

Dton Sai beach in southern Thailand is only accessible by a longtail boat from Krabi and when you're over there, there's only electricity from a generator that isn't started until sun down. It's a quiet, relaxing beach of backpackers and rock climbers with little more than a couple restaurants, guesthouses, and bars along the beach. There happens to be a new internet shop on the beach but the price is too expensive and the connection too slow to make it worth it. Phones only work along the water's edge. Secluded from any worries of the rest of the world, this beach is the perfect place to relax and not worry about sitting around relaxing, doing nothing. After all, aside from serious rock climbing, there's nothing else to do.
For non-climbers like myself, the rock climbers sneaking up the rock faces is another thing to watch while hiding in the shade from the dangerously hot sun. Standing at the base of the rock where they climb, I see no possible way to get my increasingly lazy butt up the wall. But for them there are slight cracks and edges to grip and grab all the way to some invisible finish line. (Notice the climber in the bottom left of the picture.)
The views from the beach make doing nothing all that much easier. Even the rock climbers sometime skip a climb in order to sit and relax instead, staring off into the islands floating in the horizon. Even this picture does them little justice however. Their size is enormous. From the beach they look huge but in kayak up along the waves breaking against the limestone they seem impossibly big.
I met up with Hale and Taraneh on the island (it's a beach but since it's inaccessible by land I feel like it's an island and consistently and incorrectly call it an island). We caught several windy sunsets on the beach but on this day as the sun dropped through the clouds and behind the round, steep mountains, it turned the sky, the clouds, and everything else a color we'd never seen before. With the breeze so strong and the sky turning strange hues of orange I (again, incorrectly) thought a storm could be headed our way. But slowly the sunset faded to blackness, exposing thousands of stars that only come out when in the middle of nowhere, away from any light pollution.
After Dton Sai beach and a similar trip to Ko Phi Phi, Taraneh and I took off to Khao Lak, a town on the Andamen coast where I used to live and volunteer nearly two years ago. I was able to visit old friends and go to the old places I used to hang out.For $5 a day we rented a motorbike and drove it to different beaches, waterfalls and mountains. Here, just outside Khao Sok National Park, I stand looking extra-cool with my bike helmet. The park remains the one place in the province I regret not being able to explore but the legions of leeches living there somehow make me feel alight about it.

This waterfall is so tall it's impossible to capture it in a single shot and still show its size. I've been there several times and have yet to take a beautiful picture that captures the height of the falls. Its beauty remains, like so many other things while traveling, in the moment we were there and, if anything, it was ruined by running around trying to capture it with the camera instead of just sitting down and enjoying it.
Showing up unannounced at my old school during school break was a long shot to see some old friends but it ended up there was an area-wide soccer, er... football, tournament being held. I was able to meet up with a small group of my former students, as well as the gym teacher. Then I was forced to play football in the opening game. I really suck, but it was all for fun, the fat, un-athletic men versus the women, in a goofy game to start off the tournament. The women grabbed us and ran with the ball, throwing it into the goal while another woman tackled the goalie.
These few pictures are only a tiny glimpse of the week-long tour we took of the south of Thailand, but they show some of the highlights of what was an extraordinarily relaxing 7 days. There are few times in life (at least for most) when one can see a sunset every single night, usually relaxing beach side, digging their feet in the sand and sipping on a beer. The evenings were decided on a whim at sunset and the following day usually held some plan but always with the option of letting another adventure serendipitously take us in a different direction altogether.

Even worse, an 8 year-old girl working in a restaurant was wearing a t-shirt that read, "LIVE THE DREAM. Ride me naked." Eek.

This is why getting a Chinese symbol tattoo is stupid

3 t-shirts and 3 unsuspecting people wearing them.

First, an nice-looking (as in he seems like a good person) Thai guy was wearing a shirt that read FBI in big letters. Underneath it read F.emale B.ody I.nspector. Sure, he might have understood it completely but I don't think so. This didn't look like the type of guy that was trying to advertise his willingness to "inspect" loose women on Khao San Road.

Better still, an angry old fat Thai women -I'd say about 50 years old- was frowning while walking down the street wearing a t-shirt that read: I'm a VIRGIN. Underneath in small letters it read: This is a very old t-shirt. I've seen this shirt a lot and don't think it's all that funny, but this old bird didn't seem to get the joke (or know that one existed.)

And best of all I saw some unsuspecting (or totally slutty) chick wearing a shirt that in Thai script read, "Nahm Kuei." That translates to "pussy juice." Who knows what she was told it read in Thai. And what the hell does it mean anyways? Does she really like pussy juice or well, perhaps I don't want to know. I just wish I could have followed her around just to see the stares she was getting from all the locals. I imagine it won't be long before someone pulls her aside and tells her the real meaning.