Temples & Elephants

We arrived safely in Bangkok last night. We were greeted by Vaughan Smith and a gaggle of Thai children. Vaughan explained that many had never seen the airport and were quite excited about a trip out to pick us up. Apparently they were also rather shocked to see foreigners kissing in public! Quite the experience for these kids. In any case it was great fun to be greeted by so many happy faces. We all piled into a big van and headed to Nonthaburi where Vaughan lives.

We have a room that was used as a dorm. It's pretty simple, but quite large and the beds are comfortable and clean, so that's what counts. We've got Internet access from the room, and another bonus is that Vaughan and his wife Sunantha are just down the hall.

This morning we slept in a bit to account for the late arrival. We started school work after breakfast (there is even a toaster here, so the kids are happy!), and then headed outside to find our bearings and make our way to Ko Kret, a small island which has no roads and has some temples and pottery villages. We took a bus down to the pier and went in search of the ferry to Ko Kret. After a few wrong turns, we found the ferry terminal with the help of a local.


It turned out that the island was pretty flooded (it's now the end of the wet season here), so we did not get to visit the pottery villages. Instead, we stumbled upon a couple of temples. An older gentleman saw us hesitate and motioned for us to go in. Inside a couple showed us how to light incense and wave it about, we then had to say a prayer with it held between our praying hands, then we could go into the temple, say another prayer and then shake a can filled with numbered sticks. We then selected a stick to find our number which matched us to a fortune. We all got different numbers and different fortunes. Really quite interesting.

At the next temple we saw there wasn't incense, so we went in and looked around. It was really quite beautiful and very peaceful with no tourists around.

On the way back we spotted a grocery store, but much more exciting were the two elephants just outside the entrance doors. There was a large elephant and a baby elephant and we bought some bananas and sugar cane that we could feed to them! The elephants were quite nosey and kept trying to put their trunks in our bag of treats for them.

The food is very inexpensive here. We bought two rice and curry dishes for the equivalent of a dollar and had them at lunch time. A bit spicy though!

Tonight we went off to a Baha'i gathering. It was great to hear some prayers and be in the company of so many friendly people.

By the end of the evening we noticed that Yasmin was running a low grade fever. We were concerned because she had a minor burn on her leg from where she had touched a hot motorbike exhaust pipe a few days back. We were afraid that the fever meant that she was getting an infection, but after a quick trip to the hospital, we were assured that the two were not related. We still came away with antibiotic pills just in case. They cleaned and bandaged Yasmin's leg and said several times in answer to our concerns that it was not infected.

Hopefully Yasmin will be feeling better tomorrow.

CM