Thursday 22nd. part 2

Having said a sad goodbye to our little elephant chum, back into the songthaew and off to visit a hill tribe. As it turned out, it was some sort of holiday, so the hill tribe weren't doing a whole lot (notably not brewing the local moonshine, which was a bit of a disappointment!).. but we had a nose round the village and had the chance to buy some of the local weaving... I wasn't really paying attention whilst they were explaining what was what, cos I was too busy taking photos of the excessively cute kid.. so what I thought was a scarf turned out to be a man's tunic! .. ah well, it'll make a cool cushion cover (they're kinda teeny up this way!)


Another bumpy drive through the hills and we got to Aoi's family compound. They met us with little silver bowls of water - which was fantastic as I'd been sat in the back of the songthaew and got covered in dust! This was our "homestay" on the trip: Carmen, Kerrie and I shared the upper floor of the main building - it was really pretty with mattresses on the floor and coloured mozzie nets. Weirdest selsction of stuff scattered all round the place.. a bit like an Irish theme pub.. In our room there was an old typewriter, some random musical instruments and a newspaper clipping of the fall of Singapore.. though my favourite was the photo downstairs of the King of Thailand with Elvis! We chilled out for a bit (and made a sizeable dent in the Singha supplies) until the local kids arrived to play us some music. I'm afraid we all got the giggles cos the kids looked so utterly bored!

Afterwards they came round with the instruments for us to try. Luckily, I got the guitary thing, so that was relatively easy!

Then we ate Aoi's second fantastic meal of the day, before heading outside to watch her kids do a Taekwondo demonstration. Following that there was a dancing demonstration, which we ended up having to join in with! We all got handed a pair of lighted candles.. slightly worrying after "some" Singhas... after a bit of waving them around, we set them around the fishpond and then we sent up a flying lantern with a string of fire crackers attached. No light pollution so we could see it go up for miles! Really cool.

Sat up late playing Jenga with the gang and Ken. He's off to the monastery for 15 days next week. All Thai men do it as a tribute to their mums. It's really pretty cool, but I'm not sure Ken's looking forward to it that much.. and all his beautiful hair's got to come off!