North Thailand and Laos

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