pai is love...

so....in our first 3 weeks of traveling we have discovered a few things...cities seem to stink no matter what country you are in--stick to the country and small towns and life is sooooo much smoother. there is nothing quite so beautiful as a rice paddy--there is literally something almost therapeutic about its terraced, gorgeous green flowing rows. i personally want one in my back yard. thai iced tea is best with lots of lemon and a little sugar--no milk please (as is pictured above). bamboo is amazing and used for everything here from hats to roofing--i suggest you grow some in your yard. open windows on a bus are more reliable than AC (and easier to take pictures from).. but TRAINS(opened windowed trains) are the best way to see this country...and the cheapest ($0.85 to travel almost 200 km) it's nice to be isolated in a foreign country and feel as if you are the only one traveling there, but it's also refreshing to meet people and speak a little english every now and then. there is no shortage of food in thailand...fresh, clean water is another story. we do not miss our cell phones. iPods, however, are an invention straight from god/buddha! ... and most recently we discovered that pai = love...or maybe we were just convinced by the tShirts sold at our favorite photo gallery...

Pai is the name of this little town in northern Thailand where we first sort of put our feet up and relaxed...so do hundreds of other travelers yes, but there was something about the town that made us meow. small streets, few cars, kind people, an amazing local farmers market (as they ALL are here), a cheap bungalow right on the RIVER, mountains in view and lots of young funky artists...i guess it felt like santa fe to me personally and i was inspired by the small shops of artwork i saw that were original, GOOD and not just thai tourist art. . . an older Australian man we met said he loathed Pai since it had become so gentrified...I agreed with him to a degree, but i think I was just so refreshed to see people creating and not simply just subsisting that it was sort of a relief to me. I love and respect the farmer as much as is possible. I am equally as inspired by a good photograph as I am by an ingeniously engineered and crafted rice paddy...and i guess i have seen more rice paddys than photo galleries.

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we ventured even further north towards the Burmese border...We based ourselves at Cave Lodge, which Joel Coen recommended to me as a spot to check out...it was way out in the woods near Tham Lad - one of the largest caves in the area. The owner was this caver/adventurer/nat'l geo type Aussie named John Spies who has lived here and amongst hill tribes for almost 30 years...it was a unique spot above the Lang River but also sort of had this vibe where when you turned out the lights at night you could hear the faint sounds of a banjo playing across the valley...or perhaps it was because we were the only guests at the lodge besides a quirky older australian man who seemed to have the potential to be a very good banjo player. In addition there were also quacking frogs and bugs so loud we needed ear plugs...not to mention the ant colony forming near our pillows...good times.

Tham Lad is an enormous cave and probably one of the most amazing i have seen. unfortunately it is now the wet season and so many areas that we could have explored were off limits. Mud is a common factor on any hike..and since we only brought sandals, we are getting very familiar with it. we also chose to avoid certain parts of the cave because the smell of bad guano almost made us ill. ahhhh nature.

we hopped another rollercoaster bus ride back to Chiang Mai in order to hop right on another bus to Chiang Khong, where I write to you from now---a smallish town on the Mekhong River border between Thailand and Laos... Tomorrow we will hop a small boat from the shoreline in front of our gusthouse on the river (which offers Mexican food on their menu), get our Visa stamped and then take a two-day "slow-boat" trip down the river to Luang Prabang.

hi to everyone. i personally am missing my comfy mattress and autumn in santa fe... But other than that, we seem to be pretty darn happy here on our trip. 9 weeks to go. peace.

elephant conservation center

...although our legs and arms are sore from jumping up on the elephants and riding them into the "jungle" we have made it through our very amateur 1.5 day "training". really the elephants only listen to their mahout(the guys who take care and train the elephants), they just tell us the commands to say to pretend that we are in charge:) of course liza and i got the biggest ones, who also had to be bathed seperate from the rest of the elephants....liza had the older male, who all the female elephants were in love with, one of the females uproated a tree just for him...ahhh love, makes you do ridiculous things sometimes:) they purred when they were around him, i never knew the similarities they had with kitties... i got the older female who didn't do any tricks and was a total loner...we lolligagged behind everyone on our way into the jungle. the only thing she seemed interested in was eating..definately not bathing either....why me??? NO one in their right mind would want to hang out in brown water with poop grazing their legs, but we sure did and boy did we smell good at the end of the day!! not a job for a princess....
p.s. all is well with the military coup here in thailand, in case anyone even heard about it:)
xoxoxoxooooo
acazia incorporated

chiang mai tai....

hiya. liza here. we have been hanging out in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand for the past few days...we have been eating a lot of red and green---curry that is--and tooling around the city and countryside on a little motor scooter built for two....even though the locals seem to easily fit 3 or 4. My NYC bicycling skills (thanks Chris) have been coming in handy as there seems to be no limit to the number of people who drive in the "lanes" and who can pass when , etc...it is like one big, loud, smoggy, humid video game and it is THE best way to get ANYwhere in this place. We rented bicyles yesterday and although it was nice to get some sweaty exercise, we decided that we had had enough of THAT. : )

We drove up the mountain to Doi Suthep temple today - probably the most gorgeous one we have seen yet. We think by the end of this trip we will have seen enough temples to last us a few lifetimes. The mountain ride was gorgeous and a nice break from the polluted city. Driving on the left side has been successful thus far.

Hoping to go visit some elephants in the coming days and then off to the north towards the Burmese border to see some caves and more TEMPLES!!!! waa-hoo. More later.... meow meow to you all. xoxo

too much food.....

with a quick look on the internet about what was going on in Indonesia we realized that it may not be a safe place for us to visit right now, unfortunately. neither one of us felt safe traveling through java, which was our plan, and it seemed everywhere i turned someone was saying that it was unsafe for american girls. so we got dropped off at the airport and headed to the train station for a quick jaunt up to Ayuthaya, to spend a few hours looking at ancient temples and a new one. there is no lack of large buddhas in thailand. before tuesday we had spent the weekend with Pim's family, who is my mom's cousin's wife, where liza ate plenty of pork and i had lots of fish(which i dont like, but felt rude saying no)....they kept wanting to feed us....Definitely no lack of food in this country:) we were well taken care of, a driver for everywhere we went, a bathroom with a shower separated from the toilet and our own pink and blue slippers....they paid for everything and i felt guilty for all the food that was wasted..yesterday we hopped on a train for 10 hours of fish-tailing train experience. we both like chiang mai, the dogs even seem well taken care of here:) no scrappy bug infested animals so far!! much love to everyone -acazia (my turn)

We have arrived!!!

And boy are we excited...and smelly and hot and tired. : ) We arrived in Bangkok at 11:30am on 9/6/2006. We were greeted by 98F temps and 99% humidity. Our "air-conditioned" bus ride downtown became UNair-conditioned after only 10 minutes. Good times. Good sweaty times...especially for Liza. We got a nice shower from the rainfall as we looked for a place to land for the night...which we eventually did...after a few hours. what can we say...we are picky. After a very good night's sleep (12 hours of the stuff interrupted by the loudest thunder on the planet) we awoke to the sounds of buses and motorcycles and a new day in Thailand...AND a free breakfast! All is well, minus a few allergies and the occasional armpit sweat...ok, the allOVER sweat. Sweet. Sweat. sweet. yummy. We will be exploring Bangkok until Tuesday when we fly to Jakarta, Java to begin the Indonesian leg of our adventure... Stay tuned....Meow. xoxo

Leaving Tomorrow!

Doing our last packing, organizing, panicing and hot water showering before we leave tomorrow from LAX!