To SE Asia We Go.....

My desire to go to Asia dates back to my book-worm days as a child in
Spring Coulee. I would go to the library and check out books on Chinese, Thai, Japanese etc mythology and just fall in love with the culture. More than a couple times in the last few years, I have looked longingly at trips to Thailand but the occasional horror stories of trips gone bad made me change my destination to Europe or South America. But when we were in Perth, we just couldn't not go to SE Asia. It is so close and so cheap to fly here from Perth. Countless Aussies each year flock to SE Asia for that same reason which is why I've discovered that the best people to ask re: safety in SE Asia are Aussies. And it was 99.9% favorable so after debating about it for 3 minutes, we booked a ticket to Thailand...

As hard as it was to leave our new family, the Ashes, and all our friends in Perth we are all excited to being moving on to another adventure. The only down side is that we are split again; Danielle, Brittany and I are off to tackle SE Asia on a poor-man backpacker budget and Jodie is bound for the Philippines to volunteer with a church group and provide love and care for locals.

Our journey began with 3 flights, 3 countries, 5,245 km all within 24 hrs in order to reunite us with our Team NZ friend, Grant, who'd we met on our Stray Tours in October... He was kind enough to wait in Chaing Mai in Northern Thailand for us so, it was a marathon travel session to catch up.
Our first stop in our journey was a lay-over in Singapore, which I had just previously discovered last month is both a city and country in one. We choose this lay-over destination specifically so we could reconnect with a newly-made friend from our time in Melbourne, Alex!!!! Alex just graduated Uni, moved back to Singapore and was such a trouper that he met us at the airport at 4:30 am so we could make the most of our 6 hr stint in this amazingly, immaculately, clean city. I have never had such a whirlwind tour but it was great; we had a daring breakfast of fish balls, laksa, sugar cane juice and more before jumping on the public
transportation (which is freakily clean, enough so to eat off the floor I swear... All thanks to a total ban of food and drink on all forms of transportation) I've always heard about the fantastic shopping in
Singapore, but luckily for my already-anemic wallet we were touring the city before business hours so we were thankfully resigned to window shopping...

I must say how lucky we are to be Canadian. We touched down in Bangkok and had a good sweat over possibly missing our connecting flight after seeing the border guards in Bangkok give the third degree to Russians. Luckily, we just walked right through without even a single question... Then we were on the plane and only 1.5 hours from our destination, Chaing Mai, the 2nd largest city in Thailand located in the northern tip of the country. We mused how lucky we were that after countless flights this trip, this would be our first that we wouldn't have someone waiting for us upon landing... Little did we know that once we landed we would walk off to someone holding a "I LOVE AB BEEF" sign. Turns out that Danielle's family friend had previously moved to Chaing Mai years ago and heard that we were landing and thought we would like a welcome crew. Just another example of the kindness of people we have run into. It really made our day seeing that sign.

I could go on for ages about how much we love Thailand after only one day. 'Love at first sight' is a phrase that comes to mind.
In the first day we rode elephants through stunning greenery, rode a bamboo raft down down a lazy river, played and swam in waterfalls, and bartered with vendors at the nights markets and walked away worried for our backpack's capacity to hold bargains. My favorite part of the day was when we visited a village of a long-necked Padaung tribe from the northern hills of Thailand. It was surreal seeing the stunning women and girls with gold rings around their neck and knees; I felt as if I had accidentally stumbled into the pages of National Geographic. Traditionally, only Padaung girls born on a Wednesday of a full moon were destined to have their necks fitted with the coils, but now other youngsters are enlisted to meet the tourist demand. At age 5, women of the tribe receive their first golden rings around their neck. Until age 25, they continue to receive additional rings that will gradually depress their collarbone which leads to the "elongated neck". They remove the golden coils yearly to allow one 'ring-free' day; their weakened neck muscles could not support the head much longer.

It feels good to be back in backpacker mode and we are in our best form yet. We have even whittled our luggage down (<29 kg between the 3 of us) so much that viewers of our previous amount of luggage (Unc Doug, Daniel, etc) would hardly recognize us. We have a lot of SE Asia to see in a limited amount of time. We mean business...

Love you all!!
xoxo V