Missionaries to Elephants
Our first stop after Chiang Mai was Tha Ton, a quiet little village on the Mae Kok river -- another place hard to pronounce with a straight face;). Anyway, we met a nice Australian couple who told us about the work they were doing at a local orphanage for Burmese Shan refugees, and we were invited to check it out. Well, the only time we had before leaving happenned to be Sunday morning, around 10am.
Bad timing for a couple of non-religious Jews to visit what we soon realized was a Southern Baptist missionary. It was an interesting service to say the least -- first came some beautiful gospel/rock sung in the Shan language; then the Australian preacher stood up and began by saying how honored he was to have Jews visiting the church, and then the rest of his sermon seemed to be pointed directly at us, informing us that we were heathens unless we accept the word of Jesus and convert. We were even offerred a Gideon bible before leaving.
On the upside, we did get to meet many of the kids who are all really amazing and resilient. The missionaries are doing good work to give these kids a full education and teach them Thai and English, so that they will have future job prospects across Thailand. One of their main goals is to assimilate the Shan kids into Thailand so that they do not have to return to the oppressive regime in Burma. Which left us wondering why can't these kids be raised Buddhist so they will blend in a little easier in this mostly Buddhist country.
The band playing at Sunday service:
We were off quickly enough to catch the river boat to our next stop, the amazing My Dream Guest House, half way between Tha Ton and Chiang Rai. We spent 3 nights in a very quiet river-front bungalow. We highly recommend this to our fellow travellers. We had at last gotten "off the beaten path" in Thailand, a very hard thing to do in this touristy country, as there were only 2 other foreigners with us.
Mandy enjoying our luxury bungalow on the side of the Mae Kok river:
Our first night there we were invited to a Lahu New Years celebration of dancing, music, and drinking "whiskey Lahu". We kept expecting a tourist bus to show up but again we were the only tourists there.
Lahu girls getting very excited about being photographed by a digital camera, they were literally pushing to get infront of the camera!:
Drinking Lahu Whiskey with Marsaline (Canadian), a Lahu guy, Gon (from our guesthouse) and David (Irish):
The next day we went on a strenuous walk uphill to two more hill tribes, one Lahu and one Akha. We also made it to a beautiful waterfall and a really nice hot-spring along the river.
Mandy dying from the exercise on the steep slopes!
Who was the marketing idiot at this company?
The next day found us relaxing from our hike and floating down the river on inner-tubes, and enjoying a special dish prepared, by Nan the owner, for just the two of us in bamboo stalks on the fire.
Nan preparing our bamboo cooked dinner:
Today we went to an elephant camp and rode on an elephant, and hand fed them bananas and sugar cane -- they are such gentle giants! Again, not many tourists around so we really enjoyed it.
An elephant with 2 trunks?? ;)
Now we are in Chiang Rai, catching up on internet and city errands, but tomorrow we head off to Laos, down the Mekong river. We'll let you know how it goes.