This weekend was a lot of fun. I cant believe I only have a
few weeks left of teaching. 3 to be exact. Ive been planning my end trip with
Matt and couldn’t be more excited! It is going to be the experience of a
lifetime! Im excited to see how it plays out.
I have to say I am getting very anxious about going back
home. I don’t know what my place there is anymore, I don’t know if it will feel
like home anymore. I have learned, evolved, and grown so much while here that I
don’t know if I am looking forward to being back in California or not. Needless
to say I go back and forth on this constantly.
I also find myself in a heightened state of wonderlust. I
cant wait for my next adventure and keep seeking job opportunities in other
countries. Of course I will finish law school, but I want to see the world, and
I don’t want to be stuck. I don’t want golden handcuffs… yet at the same time I
see all my friends getting married, getting engaged, having kids, and I get
scared! Am I just stalling and postponing growing up and being what society
expects me to be as an adult? By doing this am I giving up the possible
opportunity of ever being a functioning adult? Oh crazy little mind, you are
driving me nuts!
My room has been growing mold all over. There is mold in my
shoes, in my clothes, everywhere! It cant be good… I spend 20 hours a day in
this room… Not a good thing. These are the small things that make me want to go
back home… No job, nothing to do, no school, and the old dysfunctional routine
make me want to stay.
Ok back to the weekend… Friday I left school at about noon.
I took a van to Bangkok and then went to the Vietnam Embassy to get my Visa for
next month. I finished running errands at about 4 and had to wait for Jessica
to get out of work and meet me at the BTS. Well like everything in Thailand it
took way longer than expected and I waited for a good 3 hours until Jessica
finally met me.
We then headed to the minibus station where we met Robbin
and got a minibus to Pakchong. We arrived at Pakchong 3 hours later and got
picked up by the guest house where we were staying.
We stayed at Greenleaf, which was awesome. It wasn’t very
fancy or anything like that but the people who own it and run are awesome.
Exhausted we headed to our room and went to sleep relatively early.
On Saturday we woke up very early and had to meet our group
at 8 am. We had breakfast and headed out on our tour of Kao Yai (a world
heritage site). The whole trip we were riding in the back of a songtao. It was
pretty awesome. We drove for about 40 minutes into the park. The park is
massive! And it is gorgeous. It is incredibly green and beautiful. Within
minutes of having entered the park we saw monkeys, which for some reason like
to hang out by the road. It seemed as if they were as curious about us as we
were about them.
A few minutes later the tour guide stopped abruptly as he
spotted a hornbill. For those of you who don’t know a hornbill looks just like
a tucan with an extra beak on top of its beak. It was pretty awesome. We took
pictures and kept going.
Our next stop was to look at gibbons. At this point our tour
guide was incredibly excited. Gibbons are supposed to be very elusive, very
hard to find, and people go on expensive long tours looking for them, lucky for
us we were able to spot them about 3 times during our day hike. We took
pictures and watched them hike from tree to tree. We then kept driving and
finally went on a 3 hour hike. We looked at insects and learned about different
plants and ended up at a view point where we had lunch. It was very beautiful,
exhausting but beautiful.
After hiking we went to see a
waterfall, we hiked around a little bit more, took some pictures, and headed on
the last part of our tour: searching for wild elephants. This was the worst
part of the tour. We were all cold and exhausted and tired of driving up and
down the road, but our tour guide did not want to give up.
Eventually he did
and we headed back to the guesthouse, where we had dinner, relaxed and went to
bed.
Another great fun filled weekend
in Thailand.
