A Picture story of Thailand and Myanmar

Well I've finally gotten around to posting our pictures from Thailand & Myanmar (formerly Burma).  You can read a detailed narrative (written by the writer in the family, Brandon) of different legs of our crazy adventure here, here, here, and here . . . . most people won't want to read them since they're a little long, but Brandon's descriptions of what we saw and did are amazing, it'll make you feel like you were right there with us (or wish you were!) So if you've got time I think you should read them!!

We took over 600 pictures, but I've condensed it down to about 100 of them for this post . . . that was your warning, this will be a post FULL of pictures with little captions to explain, but if you've read brandon's updates you'll have a better idea of what's going on.

Note: It was over 100 degrees every day with crazy humidity . . . so please excuse our red faces, sweat drenched clothes, no makeup, and frizzy hair that you're about to view . . . they come with the vacation since we chose one of the hottest times to go! Okay, here we go . . .

This is the view of Shwedegon (Sh-way-de-go) from my parents apartment building.  This pagoda is made up of over 5 tons of Gold, craziness! There are more pictures from the day we actually visited the temple.

I just wanted to steal all the cute little babies I saw . . . there were SO many of them

We went to a wholesale market in Myanmar, so all the local markets come here to purchase their goods, it was HUGE

She's wearing Tanika on her face, it's made by grinding a special type of wood with water.  It's a natural form of sunscreen and make up.  Most women wear it, and they put it on all the babies, especially their bald little heads!

Tossing Durian (spelling?) fruit at the market, they're super spiky!

Shucking coconut husks on crazy sharp spears

The pretty foil wrapped coconuts are decorated for offerings at the temple . . . then the monks eat the offerings. 

Wherever you look, someone is sleeping

I've seen enough dried fish for my lifetime . . . this isn't even the start of it!

Carrot washers!

They stick them in these baskets with water and shake it all around to wash them really good and then dump them out.  

Fish paste . . . BARF!! like seriously, I gagged and almost puked right there in the market!

more fish . .  

oh, and here's some MORE fish!

Tossing some crazy hot peppers! There was a chicken pooping in these peppers right beside these guys . . . gotta love those standards!

Another temple (called a Pagoda) in Yangon, Myanmar

This was a really festive boat that was in a pretty park that we walked around, and later went to a dinner shower there

umm coach addition car, how FUN is that! we had to get a picture :)

There is the boat where we had dinner and watched the show

Street vendors doing some woodcarving

This was inside the steps walking up to shwedagon (the huge gold temple) . . vendors EVERYWHERE!

Shwedegon Pagoda, it was beautiful!

There were 8 stations like this around the temple, they are for each day of the week (plus one day was there twice).  You are supposed to go to the day of the week that you were born on and wash the Buddah.

Monks love visitors, they like to practice their English so they're always coming up to ask where you're from.

lots of gongs!

Mom and Dad be getting their gong on!

They call this the umbrella, it's on the top of the temple.  It's got all sorts of jewels all over it, and then a 40 carat diamond on the top of it! It's amazing there isn't a movie about a big heist to steal this umbrella!

This was just off the airstrip at Thandwe airport (still in Myanmar, just northwest a little).  This was a plane that was in a crash a couple months before we got there . . . what a nice welcome sign to their airport, ah!

Our beach front villa in Ngapali Beach . . it was luxurious to say the least!

The little crabs make these perfect little circular balls on the beach as they're digging their holes, it was crazy.

Biking is the thing to do here since there is 3 mile beautiful coastline with a few resorts and then local huts/houses.  We took the bikes from our hotel (if you can call them bikes) and about 10 minutes out Brandon's chain broke .  . . Dad had to tow him back using our camera strap, haha it was pretty funny!

local soccer game on the beach in front of our resort

ox and cart - standard in Myanmar

back to the fish . . couldn't get away from it for long.  There were acres and acres of fields of fish lying out to dry

Here he is rolling  beettlenut in a special leaf - they all chew this over in Myanmar, I guess it's like tobacco but it makes your teeth (and whole mouth) red and is has a numbing agent in it . . . don't know why anyone would do that!

Did I mention the dried fish?

This was our fruit lady!!! She would walk the beach all day long and quickly learned to always pass our villa.  We went crazy on fresh mangos, coconut juice, bananas and watermelon.  We developed quite the friendship, she started giving us free fruit and she even gave me a beautiful bracelet!

doesn't this background look fake? it isn't!! So relaxing!

Here are some nifty names of the local restaurants . . . 

some other names were "best friend" "smile" "paradise" . .  they were amusing!

We pre-ordered the red snapper the day before, so it was caught fresh for us.  I had an amazing coconut curry dish with tiger prawns that night.  The local food was DELICIOUS!! The food at our resort was fine, but was horrible at another resort we tried.  Lesson learned - stick with the local joints (especially since they were not more than $4 a plate!)

Morning catch - night fishing is huge in Ngapali beach, then early in the morning all the boats return to unload.

One morning we woke up early and went to the local fishing village.  These are all night fisherman who go out around 6pm and come back at 6am, there were a TON of boats!

Tubing on the waves in they Bay of Bengal . . . doesn't get much better :)

We bought some items for ourselves and the CSI (Children's Surgery International) Charity Gala while we were there.  This lady was so sweet, she invited us to her home, she gave me a free pearl necklace . . . she was the best! We took some pictures to display at the Gala when we auction off the pieces.

We got all dressed up in traditional Burmese  outfits and went to our dinner show on the massive boat!

I'm getting Tanika put on me!

Now we're in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  This is hand carved soap being sold at the Sunday night market.  Every Sunday hundreds of vendors some to sell their goods, we were at this market for 3 hours and still didn't see the end of it! Needless to say, we bought LOTS of presents here!

No matter how far you travel, you can't get away from nasty McD's!

a tiny portion of the market

The next day we went on a little tour up to the temple on the mountain, before we got there we stopped at this small village that had another market to shop at.  They also had a cute garden area that you had to pay 10 baht to get into (about 30 cents), I'd say it was worth 30 cents!

There was a big celebration at the Don Suthep temple that day, hundreds of Monks!

At the beginning of the 306 steps we had to climb but to get to the  temple!

High up on the mountain, this is the city of Chiang Mai

The Don Suthep Pagoda

Planet Rock restaurant . . . . wannabe Hard Rock Cafe I guess

After being dropped off for dinner by our red truck (kinda like a joint taxi) we got miserably lost trying to find our restaurant.  The plus was we found this little gem!! Everything they served was chocolate, like good quality goodness and they had buy one get one free on all drinks! YUM! It was our appetizer as we kept trekking to find our restaurant.

The next day we went on an all day outing, our first stop was an Orchid Farm

Very typical to see this in both Thailand and Myanmar, crazy!!

We stopped at one village that hosted a few different tribes, thought this was a cool carving!

This tribe was called the big ear tribe (and they had another name, but I can't remember it!)

Then we went to the long neck tribe, they start putting the neck rings on girls when they're 3 years old! I couldn't imagine doing that to Harlow in a couple years!

Cute babies everywhere!

Their form of a swing, it was pretty cool!

First - Orchid Farm, second - tribal villages, third - elephant trekking! 

We met these girls on our outing - we should have swapped cameras with them and taken pictures of each other because we didn't get any pix of us on the elephant when we were actually trekking.  So we took one of them and they took one of us and we swapped via email.

fourth stop for the day - hiking to the waterfall!  The hike up was a big hot sweaty mess, then we all jumped in and swam for a bit which made the hike back much more comfortable!

After the waterfall hike we went river rafting - we don't have any pictures of that though.  We weren't allowed to bring our cameras, which was a good thing because apparently the river is the cool hang out spot for ALL the locals.  There were hundreds of locals watching us raft down the river and they would all come out and splash us as we walked by, it was funny.  Then we switched from regular rafts to bamboo rafts for the last couple miles of the river, that was super cool too . . . we felt like Tom Sawyer!

This is the reclining Buddah in Bangkok, it's something like 100 meters LONG! it was crazy cool!

We tried to go to Grand Palace, but our luck had it that the ONE day that were wanted to go it ended up being a Buddhist holiday and the Grand palace closed at noon (we got there at 1pm).  So instead we went across the river to this  temple, Wat Ari (I think it was called something like that) it ended up being super cool though!

If you're afraid of heights then you DON'T want to go to this temple, the steps were CRAZY steep, like I was freaking out a little and I've never had a problem with heights!  It was really cool though, you could see the whole city of Bangkok from the top.

The one day of our trip that you don't see any pictures from was the day we went to Tiger Kingdom in Chiang Mai.  We snuggled with baby tigers, and played with the full size tigers as well, it was SO COOL!!  So, why don't we have pictures? Well, we had bought another SD card right before we went out to play with the tigers, but our camera didn't prompt Brandon to reformat the SD card.  After we'd taken about 80 pictures with us and the tigers we were eating lunch in their restaurant and all of a sudden the camera prompted Brandon to reformat . . . he didn't reformat it - we just left it as is and didn't risk taking any more pictures and just hoped that a camera store could retrieve our pictures even though we hadn't reformatted the card . . . no such luck :( It's such a bummer cause we had AWESOME pictures!!  We have a small amount of video, so I'll put that up on the blog another day.

So that's the condensed version of our trip pictures! If any of you actually want to see the full 600 pix then just email me and I'll send you the link to all the pix on our picasa  page.  Hope you enjoyed the pictures, we sure enjoyed our vacation!!!