Author: Kendal

On one of the real hot days that we were in Thailand we went on a bike tour around the countryside of Chiang Mai. Our guide picked us up from our place at around 8:30am. We started at a temple with a huge reclining Buddha.  Everywhere you go in Thailand there are temples and Buddhas.  We learned there are seven positions the Buddha statues are in one for every day of the week. Once we got situated on our bikes we were off, we toured different places of business in the countryside. These were very unique types of handicrafts that people did for a living. First we got to see them making metal designs by hand. The sound was excruciating! It felt like my eardrums were going to fall out! We could tell that they were working hard to make them all perfect; we even got to see some of the awards that they had earned for their craftsmanship so that was pretty cool. After the first stop we headed to our next destination which was a hand made vase area. We got to see how they turned a boring piece of a mango tree into a beautiful masterpiece; it was awesome to see all the transitions of the wood from tree to vase. Then we stopped for a quick snack break to keep up our energy. Our guide brought us fruit and bamboo filled with yummy sticky rice.  Like a Thai granola bar!  After that we continued riding in the country, where we saw all the rice fields. It was just like the movies with the people wearing the big straw hats and water boots picking up the rice. We even saw the random cow/buffalo (not quite sure which it was) being pulled somewhere with its owner leading the way. We stopped at a rice warehouse and our guide showed us the different types of rice there are but to my dismay (and my mom’s) our favorite tends to be the most fattening. In total we biked for 40km. it was a tough but fun ride – too bad for Keegan because his gears didn’t work on his bike so it was difficult on the uphill climbs.  Our final destination was some hot springs.  We had lunch at a restaurant there then we did what you do at hot springs in Thailand – we hard-boiled some eggs.  They sell small baskets of eggs and you place them in the hot water to boil.  Another fun day in Thailand – wish you were here!

As we were watching one of the metal finishers we could hear them pounding the medal on the other end of the workshop, it was so loud!

This is a different stop we made to watch the mango tree vase makers.

Here we are on the bike tour stopping to get an education on the rice fields.

The rice fileds.

Getting an education on rice.

Here we are in front of a Buddha. The Thai culture is based on the younger generations providing for their elders as time goes by; which is why you see all the large sticks supporting this aging tree.

As we road our bikes we saw this brush fire - not really sure if it was set or it was a random burn.

At the hot springs we found out the you need much more than 15 minutes for hardboiled eggs.

There's Keegan boiling our eggs with the hot springs rising in the background.