Results tagged “Thailand”

Hello everybody. We saw elephants five out of 16 days while we were in Thailand. The theme of Thailand was elephants ... elephants, elephants, elephants!  

1. We saw elephants for the first time at FantaSea, which is a theme park about Thailand. We took a ride on a big elephant. Then, we saw a spectacular show with lots of elephants in it. The elephants were my favorite part of the show.

2. The second time was at a nice hotel called Marina Phuket. A small, three-year-old elephant came in during the mornings. He was so cute! Tyler and I got to feed him little bananas. We also took rides on him. The trainer made the elephant bend his leg so I could hop on and sit on his neck. The elephant's name was Nimone and he was our favorite.

3. The next time we saw elephants was on Halloween, when we got soaked. I told you about that in my last blog.

4. My family and I went to the Thailand Elephant Conservation Center, where they train elephants and teach people about elephants. We saw a show about how they used elephants for pulling logs in the forest. That is also where we got a picture of an elephant mommy and baby. The really cool thing about the picture is that it was painted by an elephant and we watched her do it! The artist was a really cute four-year-old elephant. We thought she was the cutest elephant there.

Hello, everybody! I'm going to tell you about the Thailand you haven't heard about yet. Here are the five highlights of our Thailand trip, starting with the best.

Coming in first place, is the bat cave we visited before Halloween. The bats flew around and squeaked. The cave also had cool rock formations and stalagmites, the big pointy rocks on the ceiling of the cave. We were guided through this cave by gas torch and floated down the rivers on bamboo rafts.

Coming in second, is our boat trip in the canals outside of Bangkok. We went around in a boat. It was a strange trip because merchants grab boats with their canes to display their stock.

In third place, comes the Bangkok Traditional Puppet Theater, where we saw "The Birth of Ganesha." The show was about how the god, Ganesha, got his elephant head and saved heaven from the demons.  From then on, Ganesha became one of the most famous gods in Thailand -- the God of Wisdom.
 
Coming in fourth place, I chose the temple ruins in Sukothai, where we went to see all of the old city ruins. Sukothai used to be the capital of Bangkok, dating back to the 1200s. Although the city is in ruins, some of the Buddhas and temples remain. Many Buddhas were repaired because they are considered sacred items.
 And last, but not least, in fifth place, comes the reclining Buddha at Wat Poh temple in Bangkok. Laying down, the Buddha was 45 meters long (135 feet ... about half of the size of a football field). The entire Buddha was painted in gold leaf except the bottom, which is black and has 108 scenes carved from mother-of-pearl. It was cool on the way out of the temple because people would put tiny coins into metal pots, so all you hear is the soft clang of the coins landing in the pots.

So, there are my highlights from Thailand (and all the elephants of course).



Now, we're off to New Zealand!

For Halloween this year, we are in Thailand, which is very different than in America. People here don't celebrate Halloween, but there were still lots of tricks and treats for me.

Getting to go on an elephant was the "trick." We rode them to the river. When we got to the water, they made us take everything off except our clothes. We had to give them our shoes, hats, and all of our valuable things, but we didn't know why. When we got in the water, the elephant suddenly sat down, and then the person that was steering, made the elephant lay down on its side. Then, we knew why they made us take off all our valuables -- because we were going to get wet! We were all scared until we found out that they did it on purpose. The elephant sat back up and my Dad and I got back on. Then, it sprayed water on us with his trunk. The elephants kept on doing it until we all yelled for them to stop. It was annoying, but fun. We all had a good time. That was the funniest Halloween trick ever.

Happy Halloween, everybody! I'm in Thailand for Halloween this year and instead of running around in some cool costumes collecting an assortment of wonderful candy of various flavors and colors, we are doing some things of a different nature. The first thing we did was take a wooden boat down a river to an area of small mud houses with leaf-covered roofs. We stopped there to take a look at a tribe where women put coils around their necks. Over time, the coils push their ribs down and make it look like they have really long necks. They also wear ornaments on their head, like long pieces of fabric coming down from another piece of cloth. When we were walking around their village, we were shocked to find that a lot of the smaller girls had the coils too.