Saturday

Today we left our hotel in Phrae early and started our discoveries right away. Before we left town we stopped at a rice mill which was a family owned business and really looked like someone’s garage. Ya explained all about how you mill rice. Next door the family also ran a business to decorate and furnish funeral stands that carry the casket. In Thailand they cremate the bodies and they use these stands for the funeral and to carry the body from the funeral to the crematorium. It has gold leaf all over it and is very bright and colorful and pretty. Next door to that, we went to an indigo dying place. Again, it is family run and it was really interesting. They still use the dye from the native indigo plant and boil it and dye it all by hand. They are doing batik now too and we got to try our hand a doing a little sample to take home, which was fun. Of course, the discovery also included a happy room stop and a shop where they sell their things. They were so pretty and nice and most of us enjoyed supporting the local industry!
We continued on for a couple of hours but during the drive, we had another couple of discoveries. There was a farmer in the rice fields and he had both a tractor which he was using to prepare part of the field for the next step in the rice growing, and also several water buffalo. So we stopped and had a great photo op. We got so tickled because before we left, an ice cream vendor was motoring by and saw us and stopped to try to sell us some ice cream! The farmer bought some, but we had just had a rest break and bought snacks so there were no takers on the ice cream from our bus. It was just funny as he appeared out of nowhere. We stopped in Chiang Rai for lunch at a beautiful hotel. The meal was good and included a salad we could eat and some French fries which most of us really enjoyed! I did NOT eat rice for lunch! Lol. After lunch, we went a little way out of town and stopped to get on local transportation up to the hill tribe villages. The local transportation is a truck with seats in the back so about 8-9 of us could ride in a truck. It was a lot of fun. We wound our way up the narrow mountain road to the first village. I will have to get the names of the two tribes we visited from Ya again tomorrow, but they were different and both fun. The first one is more modern and has adapted a good bit to the outside world. We had fun shopping at their stalls of handmade items and seeing the way the ladies dressed. In both the hill tribes, it is mainly the older ladies who continue to dress in their native dress. The second hill tribe was much more simple and undeveloped. The houses were huts on a hillside and the mud was thick and stuck to our shoes as we crossed the creek and climbed up the steep hillside to see what their village was like. The grandmothers in the village were dressed in their native attire and enjoyed the attention. It was very interesting to see the village. We drove back to town in the truck backs and met our bus at a gas station. Our shoes were caked in mud but a lady came and there was a trough where she scrubbed our shoes (with our feet inside!) and got them all clean from the mud. We paid her 20 bat, which was less than a dollar-well worth it!
Our hotel is a resort outside of Chiang Rai called the Golden Pines Resort. The cabins did not look too fancy on the outside but they are really nice on the inside with a separate tub and a shower and beautiful wood floors and rock tile in the bathrooms. We are here for two nights so all of us came in and washed our clothes from the last 3 days and so there is laundry hanging everywhere.
We had a good buffet dinner that included fish and salad and the delicious pineapple and pineapple turnovers and French fries again and anything Thai you would want. After dinner, Ya told us there was a wedding that had taken place down the road in the village and they were still having the party to celebrate and took any of us down that wanted to go and see. So we trooped down the road and “crashed” the wedding party! By this time, the bride and groom were in jeans and tshirt but she still had flowers in her hair. The family was dancing and music was playing and they insisted we come in and dance with them and they were so nice and gave the ladies flowers and kept offering us things to drink, which we declined. It was definitely a discovery event!
So it was a full day and we really had fun and saw so much. Megan is better today-as she said-she has ankles again. They had been so swollen she had trouble wearing her good shoes and so it was good to have her back on her feet again! Jim’s back is holding out-he has had some rough times but has been such a trooper and has gone and done and not missed a thing. I think he is convinced it is time to do the surgery when we get back, but he has not let it stop him from participating and enjoying.