Hi there,
It's Friday! I bet you're all excited for a week off school :)
We have been exploring the North of Thailand and a country called Laos which borders Thailand.
After getting through the floods in Sukhothai we travelled by bus to Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand. It was a really great town with lots of beautiful Buddhist temples, it also had the spiciest food that we have eaten - it made my mouth feel like it was on fire! Whilst we were there we spent a day at a Thai cooking school where they taught us how to make lots of delicious thai food. We made our own spring rolls, chicken fried rice, a thai green curry (my favourite) and a fried banana pudding in a sauce that tasted like toffee. After we had made each dish we went in to a room to eat them and we were so full up by the end of the day!
We also went walking to see some tribes who live in the hills around Chiang Mai, they speak their own language because most of them have never been outside their village. One of the tribes was the 'Karen tribe' who fled Burma and settled in Thailand. The women in the tribe wear brass rings around their necks all the time to make their neck look longer. They put the first ring on to girls when they are about 5 years old and then they add one every year. The rings were so heavy and must have been very uncomfortable, see if you can find a picture of the Karen tribe. They also wear very detailed clothing which is hand stiched and the full tribal outfit takes a whole year to make! One lady let me try on one of the headresses which are brightly coloured and covered in bells- it was so heavy on my head! They live very like the tribes who live in the rainforest that my class learnt about last year. They make all their own clothes and grow or hunt all their food, it was so interesting to learn about their life because it is so different to ours.
After Chiang Mai we took a four hour bus further north to get to Chiang Rai. Here we visited the 'white temple' which is completely different to all the others that are here. All the other temples are hundreds of years old but this one is new and completely white, it looked like a Disney castle! A Thai man has dedicated his life to building seven modern temples, so far only one is finished but we saw all the others being built. It will take a very long time to build them all because they are all extremely detailed on the outside and they have a painter who is hand painting images all over the inside walls. We saw him and he was sat on some scaffolding in the temple with a tiny paintbrush. He had completely filled two walls and two were still bare. You would have liked the pictures; we saw Spiderman, Batman, Neo, Aladdin and even Ben 10 hidden amongst the paintings!
We then wanted to get in to Laos which was a veeerry long journey, it took us two days! First we had to get a bus to Chiang Khong which is on the border for Laos. From here we took a slow boat all the way down the Mekong river until we reached Luang Prabang in Laos. We were on the boat for 5 hours the first day and then we stopped to sleep before another 8 hours on the boat the next day. It was a really interesting trip though because we saw lots of tiny villages that are built along the river. Why do you think lots of villages are built along the river? The houses in the villages are made of straw, they are round with a pointy roof. Lots of the villagers came down to the boat to sell things to us or to collect sacks of rice for the village, I loved all the village children who were very excited to see the boat!
When we eventually made it to Luang Prabang we were very happy - it is my favourite town so far. It is a french colony and so all the buildings are French in style and they lit everywhere with fairy lights at night. I also had my favourite day of our trip so far here. We went to an elephant sanctuary to meet the elephants, they were amazing. The elephants are very clever and are looked after by boys called Mahouts, the boys grow up with the elephants and they were like best friends! They play together all day and the boys taught us the commands to ride an elephant. The elephant will kneel down to let you hop on its back and then you have to grip on! You say 'how' to ask it to go forward, 'ya' to stop, 'toy' to reverse, 'khwa' to go right and 'sai' to go left. The elephants listened to the mahouts but they didn't really listen to me beause they didn't know me! The best part was taking them in to the river to play. As soon as they got in to the water the elephants put their heads under and stayed down for ages. Then they popped up and started squirting us all with water! We played with them for ages and had lots of fun, I really love elephants now!
After Luang Prabang we had to travel for 8 hours on a bus to Vang Vieng, it was a scary bus journey. Their roads are not like ours, they are like dirt tracks, so you bump around everywhere which wasn't nice as we were 1000 feet up in the mountains and it was a long drop down! It was all ok though and when we got to Vang Vieng we went tubing. You sit on a huge rubber ring and float down the Nam Song river, it was so beautiful as there were huge mountains all around us but you had to make sure you were concentrating to steer yourself around lots of rocks.
Today we caught a bus to the capital of Laos which is called Vientiane. After a few days here we will be flying to Vietnam. I have heard that some interent sites are banned there like they were in China so fingers crossed this blog isn't and I can tell you all about Vietnam.
Enjoy half term!! xx
Friday, 21 October 2011
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Malaysia and Bangkok
Hi everyone!
I hope you all enjoyed the recent sunny days you had :)
I have been all over Malaysia now and absolutely loved it there. After Langkawi I flew to Penang which is Malysia's second largest city and famous for its very tasty food so I ate lots of nice things. It was the first British settlement in Malaysia so there were lots of English buildings around as well as a Chinatown and a Little India. There was also a beach but when we tried to walk along it a part of it in the middle was flooded, I started to walk through the water but began to sink so I quickly ran back! We stayed with a Malaysian family who were really nice and we found out that their children have to get up for school at 5.30 am! I bet none of you would like that and I wouldn't like to get up that early to teach you!
From Penang we flew to the East coast of Malaysia and then got a speedboat to the Perhentian islands. The boat was really really fast and bumpy, I kept getting splashed! The islands were incredibly beautiful with super white sand and the sea was so clear I could see all the fish swimming around. We went on a snorkelling trip which was really good. The boat took us to different places where we had to jump in with our flippers and snorkel on and then swim around with our heads under the water looking at the fish. It was amazing under the sea...like a different world. There were so many fish which were really bright colours and I saw lots which were like Nemo! At one point when we were in the boat the driver suddenly told us to jump off the boat because he had spotted...a turtle! It was huge and lots of little fish were following it, I loved seeing the turtle.
After a few days at one beach we moved to another one which was really small and only had 6 people staying on it so we felt like we had it all to ourselves! There were lots of hammocks strung along the beach and every night a man cooked for us all and we had our tea together. One day he went fishing and caught a HUGE Barracuda (see if you can find a picture of one) which he then cooked for us and on the other night we had a big BBQ on the beach. We went snorkelling again and saw another turtle, the man who lives on the beach told me that the turtle had buried her eggs under one of the chalets and he showed me where it was. The turtle was swimming around waiting for the eggs to hatch and enter the sea. Every night the man had to stay awake to protect the eggs because some naughty men were coming on boats to try and steal the turtle eggs because they are very valuable. Luckily they hatched really early one morning and they didn't manage to steal any. The female turtles are very clever and they create two nests, one of them is pretend to trick predators - see if you can find out more about it. Petani beach was my favourite place so far :)
I was sad to leave but I was excited too because we were going to Kuala Lumpur which is Malaysia's capital. It has the tallest twin towers in the world, they were SO big and I was a bit nervous about going to the top and then we found out we couldn't go up anyway because they are closed until Christmas :( I have been really missing cheese because they don't have it in Asia so when I found a place in Kuala Lumpur selling cheese I had a whole plate full!
After Kuala Lumpur we moved back in to Thailand. We went to the capital, Bangkok where we met up with one of our friends from England which was good. We visited the largest market in the world which has 8,000 stalls!! They sold absolutely everything there and it was all so cheap, you could buy t-shirts for 40p. We took a boat trip along the canals of Bangkok where lots of Thai families live. Their houses were built on stilts in the water and they use boats instead of cars to get around their neighbourhood. We saw two animals like crocodiles and our boat driver said he thought they were lucky. There were lots of lovely temples in Bangkok and one we went inside had a huge reclining buddha made of gold, I couldn't believe how big it was.
We are now in Sukhothai but we are struggling to do anything or go anywhere because Thailand has recently had a lot of rain and Sukhothai is flooded. We walked through the flood last night to get some food and it came halfway up to my knee! So cross your fingers and toes for me that it doesn't carry on raining!
xx
I hope you all enjoyed the recent sunny days you had :)
I have been all over Malaysia now and absolutely loved it there. After Langkawi I flew to Penang which is Malysia's second largest city and famous for its very tasty food so I ate lots of nice things. It was the first British settlement in Malaysia so there were lots of English buildings around as well as a Chinatown and a Little India. There was also a beach but when we tried to walk along it a part of it in the middle was flooded, I started to walk through the water but began to sink so I quickly ran back! We stayed with a Malaysian family who were really nice and we found out that their children have to get up for school at 5.30 am! I bet none of you would like that and I wouldn't like to get up that early to teach you!
From Penang we flew to the East coast of Malaysia and then got a speedboat to the Perhentian islands. The boat was really really fast and bumpy, I kept getting splashed! The islands were incredibly beautiful with super white sand and the sea was so clear I could see all the fish swimming around. We went on a snorkelling trip which was really good. The boat took us to different places where we had to jump in with our flippers and snorkel on and then swim around with our heads under the water looking at the fish. It was amazing under the sea...like a different world. There were so many fish which were really bright colours and I saw lots which were like Nemo! At one point when we were in the boat the driver suddenly told us to jump off the boat because he had spotted...a turtle! It was huge and lots of little fish were following it, I loved seeing the turtle.
After a few days at one beach we moved to another one which was really small and only had 6 people staying on it so we felt like we had it all to ourselves! There were lots of hammocks strung along the beach and every night a man cooked for us all and we had our tea together. One day he went fishing and caught a HUGE Barracuda (see if you can find a picture of one) which he then cooked for us and on the other night we had a big BBQ on the beach. We went snorkelling again and saw another turtle, the man who lives on the beach told me that the turtle had buried her eggs under one of the chalets and he showed me where it was. The turtle was swimming around waiting for the eggs to hatch and enter the sea. Every night the man had to stay awake to protect the eggs because some naughty men were coming on boats to try and steal the turtle eggs because they are very valuable. Luckily they hatched really early one morning and they didn't manage to steal any. The female turtles are very clever and they create two nests, one of them is pretend to trick predators - see if you can find out more about it. Petani beach was my favourite place so far :)
I was sad to leave but I was excited too because we were going to Kuala Lumpur which is Malaysia's capital. It has the tallest twin towers in the world, they were SO big and I was a bit nervous about going to the top and then we found out we couldn't go up anyway because they are closed until Christmas :( I have been really missing cheese because they don't have it in Asia so when I found a place in Kuala Lumpur selling cheese I had a whole plate full!
After Kuala Lumpur we moved back in to Thailand. We went to the capital, Bangkok where we met up with one of our friends from England which was good. We visited the largest market in the world which has 8,000 stalls!! They sold absolutely everything there and it was all so cheap, you could buy t-shirts for 40p. We took a boat trip along the canals of Bangkok where lots of Thai families live. Their houses were built on stilts in the water and they use boats instead of cars to get around their neighbourhood. We saw two animals like crocodiles and our boat driver said he thought they were lucky. There were lots of lovely temples in Bangkok and one we went inside had a huge reclining buddha made of gold, I couldn't believe how big it was.
We are now in Sukhothai but we are struggling to do anything or go anywhere because Thailand has recently had a lot of rain and Sukhothai is flooded. We walked through the flood last night to get some food and it came halfway up to my knee! So cross your fingers and toes for me that it doesn't carry on raining!
xx
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)