A few small vacations...and one long one!

Our summer this year was very hectic--but fun! However, we were looking forward to a little r&r come September.

As September began, we managed a few small excursions--the first was to Ayutthaya with Bernice, a friend from church. Ayutthaya is the old capital of Thailand that was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767. I'd been before, but neither Amanda or Bernice had--and I'm always up for visiting ancient sites again! It's not hard to get to Ayutthaya--it's only a few hours by train from Bangkok, so we decided to go there just for the day.

The fun started with the train ride (see previous picture)--we bought third class tickets (of course) which didn't come with seat numbers (naturally)...and just few other people seemed to have followed suit! Oh, and we were late (go figure...). After literally jumping on the train seconds before it left (it's always a bad sign when the locals are also running for the train--not just the foreigners) we found the third class section. According to the guide book, "Don't bother booking ahead--just show up and get a third-class ticket--there's always lots of seats."

Right.

There was one third class car and it was packed!!! We ended up sitting on the floor surrounded by crowds of people. Despite being squished in and sitting on the floor though, our friend Bernice managed to fall asleep for the entire journey...

As soon as we arrived, we jumped onto the little foot ferry to get across the river and then rented bicycles for the day. Thankfully Ayutthaya isn't too hilly--so most of the ride was quite leisurely, despite the heat. It was fun: temples, palaces, and more temples--all in ruins since the city was sacked by the Burmese--but still impressive. It's interesting to me that a Buddhist country (Burma) can attack a Buddhist country (Siam) and the Buddhist attacking army feels the need to sack the Buddhist temples and lob off all the buddha heads....? It seems weird to me. Some really beautiful sites there though--if you consider crumbling ruins beautiful like I do. :)

Our next "vacation" wasn't so much a vacation--but it was so much fun!!! It was called the Vertical Marathon. The tallest building in Bangkok is called the Banyon Tree and every year they have a charity run--straight up! :) Sixty-one flights of stairs, over 1000 steps, to the top. I ran it in under 15 minutes which put me at about 200 of 400 people. Amanda was just under 13 minutes! It was tough--but not as tough as I thought...and the view from the top was incredible!


Like the Vertical Challenge, our next bout of time-off also took place in Bangkok. Liz, a friend of a friend, came to stay with Claudia (we lived with Gary and Claudia for part of our stay in Bangkok) and she really wanted to go to the snake farm. We decided to tag along, 'cause snakes sounded kinda fun! It was great! They had a snake handling show where they brought out cobras and pythons and other deadly snakes and showed them off. The highlight was getting a python wrapped around our neck though--that was cool.

Finally we come to our "long" vacation--still not too long, but longer than most we've taken. At the end of September we took six days off and headed to one of the southern islands: Koh Lanta. It was beautiful! It was still off-season which was great because there were very few people. Unfortunately the reason it was off-season was because it was monsoon season--but what the heck. We're not made of brown sugar... Actually, we missed out on water sports, which was sad, but we also got to enjoy a stormy sea which strongly reminded us of the beach off the Olympic Penninsula in Washington where we spent lots of great time as kids. Really! It was like Kalaloch with palm trees. How awesome is that!?

The other fun part of our trip was the accommodation. Some friends of ours gave us a voucher for a stay at a 5* resort! It was amazing--I've never stayed at anything like that before. It was only for two days though, so we went from the cheapest place on the beach--to the most expensive place--to something mid-range (the picture is the balcony of our third "home.")! It was kinda fun. Since it was a smaller beach and off-season, the people at the restaurants and hotels recognized us as we popped in and out of several different places. They thought we were rather strange...

Despite the lack of water sports we still managed to swim in the ocean everyday and when I say swim I mean play in the waves! We did swim in the infinity pool when we were staying at our 5* resort though! We also did other necessary beachy things--built a sand castle, went beachcombing and took long walks. Actually, the end of the beach was blocked by a rocky point and we really wanted to see what was on the other side, so, one day we went trekking over the point and along the coast. It was fabulously beautiful and good fun--even if we never found the secret beach I was hoping for!

Our beach vacation took us to the end of September. We spent the next two weeks madly scrambling to get everything done and saying good-bye... God really does work in miraculous ways--we were in Bangkok eleven months even though our plan was to stay only five weeks! It was hard to leave Bangkok... We met so many awesome people there. I can't believe we were there almost a year! However, more of that in the next post.