Last weekend was insane. I have been putting off writing about it because a) it’s going to be a crazy long post and b) I’ve been avoiding thinking about all of the times I almost died (6 in all), but it is a rather amusing story (or at least that’s what John said). Anyway, here it goes.
Last weekend we went to the Thi Lo Su Waterfalls in Thailand. We being the four GROW interns and four BWU staff members (Zin Zin, Zar Zar, Mae, Naw Lay Dee) and Naw Lay Dee’s son. His name is rather complicated (I never caught it completely) and we were told just to call him “little son” in Burmese (since Naw Lay Dee also has an older son). Both names are rather complicated though so I’m just going to go with “the son” when I refer to him. Jo Su, our car driver, also came along with us to the waterfalls.
Noe Noe (BWU staff member who didn’t come with us but planned the trip) described these waterfalls as the biggest in the world, but they had never been surveyed, so it’s unconfirmed. The “never being surveyed part” should have tipped me off that something fishy was going down. I should have looked it up but I blindly believed her, and now that we are back, we can’t find anything anywhere that lists these waterfalls as exceptionally large.
At the time though, none of this mattered because the picture on the magnet that Zar Zar showed us was beautiful! We thought it would be a great adventure and nice to get out of Mae Sot for a bit. This is how the trip was described for us: driving for a couple of hours, spending the night at a guest house, and rafting/hiking the next day to reach the waterfall. The rest of Saturday and Sunday would be spent at the waterfall swimming around. Sunday afternoon we would head back to the river, raft, drive to the guest house, sleep over night and drive to Mae Sot Monday morning. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? Yeah well that’s what I thought and boy was I wrong.
We left BWU at 1 pm on Friday and all piled into the back of Jo Su’s pick-up truck. There are photos of the pick-up truck on GlobeMed at Whitman’s SmugMug account (the link is on the other blog). It’s basically your average pickup truck but in the bed there are cushioned benches drilled into the bottom and a metal railing that goes over the top. There is also a metal roof covering the rail so all in all not too bad. The benches aren’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but what can be expected, it’s the back of a pick-up?
Rachael, Morgan, Dandi, Zar Zar and I piled into the pick-up along with everyones’ luggage. Jo Su drove the truck, Naw Lay Dee (oldest camper) took the passenger seat and Mae, Zin Zin, and the son sat in the cab. They got it lucky. So we are in this pickup truck, all ready to go drive on the “Death Highway” for three hours (it actually took four). The road has been nicknamed, “Death Highway,” because a lot of men died constructing it in the ‘80s. This highway ultimately connects Burma and Thailand over a huge mountain range.
Even though the nickname originated in the highway’s construction, 50+ people die on it every year, so it’s not the safest road. You continuously drive up and down mountains on this incredibly curvy road (the turns were so sharp, it was ridiculous). I eventually had to stop looking forward at the curves because it scared me so bad to see what the truck was about to do. We drove along the Death Highway for 4 hours and it was miserable. I don’t normally get car sick and thankfully, didn’t actually throw up, but I’ve never felt so disoriented in a car before. Because the ride was so jerky, I had to clutch onto an overhead railing to steady myself and keep from sliding into Dandi (or off the edge into the road) but you can’t hold your hand above your head forever because you lose circulation. So every once in a while, I’d grab the bar behind me and hold on. Rachael got a great picture of us all bent over and I’m holding the bar behind me. The first hour I sat upright, but that really wasn’t jiving with my lunch, especially when I would glance over the edge and see the straight drop down into the valley hundreds of feet below if we went over the edge.
I decided clutching my stomach, bending over into my knees and praying that we would survive this car ride was the best way to go. And boy did I pray. The only time I stopped was when I drifted off to sleep for all of two seconds before being roughly awoken by driving over a pot hole, which shot me 3 inches straight in the air. After that unnerving experience, I forced myself to stay awake.
All in all, that car ride was the worst of my life. The one slightly positive memory I have is driving through this herd of cows. We were going pretty fast on the highway, all things considered (40-50 km), but at one point we momentarily slowed down. I was overjoyed because I thought we would keep going slowly but it turned out there was 10 cows blocking our way. They eventually moved but not quickly (glad to see that all cows are lazy regardless of country of origin). Thailand cows are also different from CA cows—they have one huge hump right behind their head. They kind of look like hunchbacks or fat camels. The best part about seeing the cows was that we had no idea why we were stopping until we passed them, turned around, and saw 10 cows staring at us.
Shortly after seeing the cows, it started pouring rain. I was very thankful for the covering over the trunk bed, but that didn’t help the rain that was pelting us sideways. Rachael and I were sitting on the edges so we pulled out our ponchos and covered ourselves. It was good too because when we took them off later, they were covered in this gross muddy water. >.< I’m not a fan of mud. Neither is Rachael.
There were also flaps on the sides of the railings that we could pull down to keep our backs from getting drenched. It was nice because it kept us dry, but it caused there to be significantly less fresh air in the back and everything started to smell like car exhaust. It was gross. That was another reason I decided to bend down…so I could breath my soapy smelling skirt instead of the exhaust filled air.
Four torturous hours later, we arrived at the guest house in Umphang. My legs were all wobbly and it was all I could do to keep myself from crying that we had made it safely. Scenarios kept rushing through my head of our car being thrown off the side of the mountain and then being stranded having absolutely no idea where we were. If I called authorities to come pick us up, I had no idea what mountain we were on or the real name of the Death Highway. Doesn’t sound much like me to not check that stuff out ahead of time but, you see, no one hear speaks or reads Thai. Granted we probably could have found something in English (and if I ever go on another adventure out of Mae Sot, I will definitely do my due diligence and find the English name).
Ok, so it’s 5 pm, we have just arrived at the guest house and when we walked in, I did cry. There were beds! Glorious beds! Not with mattresses but something very similar and I didn’t really care. I’ve been sleeping on the ground with a little mat for the past three weeks and while it’s not uncomfortable, I wouldn’t go as far to say that it was comfortable. There was also a toilet with a flush (!!!! BWU has a toilet bowl but no flusher), a SINK, and a shower with hot water! It turns out the water heater was broken and the best we could get was warm water, but I didn’t care. It was continuous water coming out of a shower head instead of buckets of water that you pour on yourself!
Rachael, Zar Zar, Dandi, Morgan and I were sharing a room. We all plopped down onto the three beds (2 people/bed) and passed out for a solid hour. I woke up in a daze, was very confused. I managed to stumble out of the room to our little balcony and find a bunch of bananas fairly easily though. The view from the balcony was gorgeous—we were looking out over this valley that was filled with green and brown fields. I gazed into the valley and munched on my bananas for a bit. They have mini bananas here, which are great! Much sweeter than long bananas—I definitely recommend the sweet ones if you see them in the US. Within the next 20 minutes everyone had awoken (except Zar Zar) and we decided to go get dinner. Everyone plopped back into the truck and we went to a Thai restaurant. I got chicken curry—it was quite good. I normally don’t like curry but this one was ok. It was basically chicken soup, and I drizzled the broth on top of my rice. There was also this communal soup that they got for us to share and I think I tried to eat bamboo. It didn’t work. I chewed and chewed before realizing whatever plant was in mouth wasn’t going to break down into something that I could swallow, so I ended up doing a Robert and spitting it back into my bowl.
After dinner, we went to buy food for the next two breakfasts, two lunches, and one dinner. Apparently, there are no stores that sell food near the Thi Lo Su Waterfalls. That should also have tipped me off that something was wrong, because if this was a tourist destination, there would have to be a store. Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure now that not many tourists go to these waterfalls >.> So guess where we went to buy food. Just guess. Please. In your head. DO IT. Ok, now that you’ve guessed something logical like a grocery store, be prepared for this. We got food for all of our meals at 7/11. They aren’t any better stocked with nutritious food here in Thailand than they are in the US. So yeah, I grabbed a couple bowls of dried ramen, bread, peanut butter, oatmeal cookies (THESE SAVED ME) and banana chips—equally as good as the oatmeal cookies but they caused me to have a bad dream (a monkey attacked my head because I inadvertently killed his monkey friend. The signal to jump on me was one monkey threw a bag of banana chips to another monkey).
Let’s just say we were all less than pleased to buy all of our food for the next day and a half at 7/11 but it looked like we didn’t have any other options. We were also in charge of carrying all of our own food, so I tried to grab stuff that I knew wouldn’t weigh too much.
300 baht later, I had all my food and was leaving the 7/11. We stumbled back into our guest house, I fell asleep quickly without taking a shower (I had taken one that morning and didn’t feel like taking another) and drifted into a shivering sleep until 6:15 am. Someone had left the AC on too high so it was FREEZING in the room, but every time I woke up, I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That and I was sleeping in a cocoon sleeping bag liner and had myself so tangled up that if I had tried moving to get to the AC switch, I would have fallen over.
AT 7 am sharp, we were all out of our rooms and on the way to the river where we would be rafting for the next 4 hours. To get to the river (which was only a 5 minute drive away), we piled into the back of some random guy’s pick-up. This one didn’t have benches though, so we were all literally sitting in the bed. I was very happy when the ride was over 5 minutes later. Rachael’s most memorable comment during the ride: “Well, looks like we are back on the farm!” 🙂
Before I know it, we have pulled up next to the river, have unloaded all of our stuff, and we need to start bagging everything in plastic. My backpack was incredibly small because it zipper attaches to the front of my suitcase, which was good because it fit into these tiny plastic bags. The other girls had more trouble, but luckily, I had brought extra large plastic bags (thanks, Mom). When we first drove up, there was only one raft and I was incredibly skeptical about all of us fitting inside. It was big but not big enough for 10 people and all of our stuff. Luckily, while we were fumbling around with our plastic, another truck drove up with a raft and you could hear everyone who didn’t know the second raft was coming (i.e. anyone who didn’t speak Burmese….i.e. the four of us) breath a huge sigh of relief. We piled into the rafts and at 8:30 am, pushed off from the riverbank. Each raft had two tour guides who were actually rowing/rafting the boat. My raft had the four GROW peeps and Jo Su (driver). The other raft had the four BWU staff members and the son.
It was a beautiful ride—my favorite part of the entire trip. It was completely silent and jungle was pristine. It felt like we were the only ones from miles around (and we probably were because we only passed one group of fishermen in the whole fours hours). I would say the rafting trip was absolutely perfect except there were jumping spiders. Ok, so some of them were called water skippers (which everyone on the boat was familiar with except me) but I would argue you could still call them spiders because they were creepy and had eight legs. Jo Su was sitting next to me in the back and was kind enough to kill whatever weird bugs flew into our raft next to me….there were a lot. I am glad Jo Su was there because I doubt I could have convinced the other girls to get rid of as many bugs as he did.
After a few hours of rafting, we pulled on the side of the bank and were going to visit a natural hot spring. It was wonderful—the first time I have felt hot water in weeks (not including soup). Everyone quickly scrambled in and the water was low enough that it only came to our knees. I considered getting my clothes wet but thought better of it because we still had a long road ahead of us. There were red ants everywhere that we had to step on to get to the bamboo bridge to get to the hot spring, so there was a downside to this mystical paradise. Definitely worth it though and I didn’t get any bites!
We then hopped back into the raft and continued on our way. Then, oh an hour or so later, our raft starts rapidly filling with water. I was sitting in the back of the boat and I could tell that one of the holes where they would add air to the bottom of the raft was deflating and letting water in. There was confused shouting in Burmese before we pulled off to the side of the bank. The other raft was in front of us by and bit and they couldn’t see/hear us anymore. Great. Jo Su tethered the raft to a tree and then the two tour guides got out and used this manual pump to add air back into the raft. The men took turns jumping on it and slowly but surely the raft inflated.
While they were concerned about our raft sinking…the four of us were diverting our attention elsewhere. When we had crashed into the river bank, several spiders had entered our boat from the surrounding bushes. Morgan had her hands full as she is the only one ok with bugs (but not snakes) and there was a spider massacre in the front of the raft. I was almost ready to jump ship and float down the rest of the river, but then I realized that there were probably creepier things than spiders swimming down there—I just couldn’t see them because the water was so muddy.
Ten minutes later, we were back on the way to the waterfall. When we passed the BWU boat, Zar Zar goes “We were worried about you!” In my head I responded sarcastically, “Yeah we were pretty worried too.”
The next stop on the rafting trip was this piece of bank that was kind of like a beach where we stopped for lunch. There must have been some miscommunication because BWU had bought all of us fried rice for lunch so one of my ramen noodle cups wasn’t necessary; however, I was very glad they did because the ramen noodles wouldn’t have given me enough energy for what was about to happen. We hurriedly ate lunch on the bank, at which time, someone told us that if we were not going during the rainy season, there would be a car at this point to pick us up and drive to the waterfall. Unfortunately, because of all the rain, the Thai government decided to shut down this road so cars were not allowed to take tourists to the waterfall. Major major bummer for us. When we were hiking, Zar Zar kept saying, “Oh we really are so unlucky.” Yeah, unlucky, or rather cursed to live a day of utter misery.
Ok, I’ve alluded to this mysterious hike enough times, it’s time to just get down to it. Let me clarify a few things about myself in case they haven’t been clear already.
- I hate bugs. End of discussion.
- I do not consider myself an outdoors person. Don’t like dirt.
- I have never enjoyed hiking and still cannot understand why people do it for fun.
Now that that’s established, time to tell you about the last hike of my life. About an hour after lunch, we stopped on the side of the river bank. Let me tell you, it looked just like all the other bushes and trees that we had seen so far. I wondered out loud how anyone could possibly tell how this piece of riverbank was where we needed to stop to get on the trail and Raachael pointed to a tiny sign up in a tree in Thai. So, I guess if you knew you were looking for a sign up in a tree, you would know where to stop, by otherwise forget it. It was at this point that we decided the only tourists who go to this waterfall must have local tour guides. There’s no way you would have survived that raft ride and the following hike because all the signs were in Thai. Our tour guides were Burmese but I am guessing that they have done this enough times that they have the way memorized. I tried to ask Jo Su how many times our raft paddlers had gone to the waterfall before (to check out their qualifications). I didn’t get a straight answer but it sounded like these guys had done this many times before. Oh also, when we were pulling up to the riverbank, a giant tree climbing spider full of awfulness jumped into the water. It was terrible. Bigger than my fist and black and yellow. I scrambled out of that raft so fast. I hadn’t seen where the evil bugger went and I did not want to look down and see him on my foot.
Three of the raft rowers stayed with the rafts overnight and were going to wait for us to come back the following day. One of the rafters came along with us as a tour guide. He looked more Thai to me than Burmese but he could have been Burmese. The differences in ethnic group appearances are huge across Burma. Palaung and Karen people don’t look alike at all and their areas border each other.
So we are hiking, it’s been 5 minutes and I turn to Zar Zar and ask the distance to the waterfall. She nonchalantly responds, 22 miles. MILES. I stopped walking and just stared at her. 22 MILES. ARE YOU JOKING ME? That’s next to impossible! How are we going to hike 22 MILES in three hours?!??! YOU SAID THE HIKE WAS ONLY 3 HOURS!!!!! I was seriously considering joining the rafters for the night. We argued about it for a bit before Jo Su said it was only 6 km. Turns out it was actually 9 km but hey, he was only 3 km off.
After 30 minutes, we stopped hiking through the jungle and ended up at a road. The road the car would have driven down if it wasn’t the rainy season. We regroup—it was bloody hot—and Naw Lay Dee (who I’m guessing is in her late 40s) gave some of us her stuff so she wasn’t carrying as much. She was having a hard time hiking. It also didn’t help that she was wearing super flimsy sandals. At this point, we split into two groups. The raft leader, Rachael, Morgan, Zin Zin, Mae and son went ahead and Dandi, Jo Su, Naw Lay Dee, Zar Zar and myself stayed behind. I wanted to make sure Naw Lay Dee was going to be ok and I did not feel like hiking quickly. It was hot and humid and we were pretty high up (so add in altitude). We start climbing this mountain on the road and it was the steepest road I have ever seen. For those of you have been to Russian River, think of that one super steep hill that you have to climb to get to Grandma’s cabin and imagine walking up that continuously for 4 hours. It was awful. So steep. And awful. Mostly just awful. And it was all uphill. There wasn’t any downhill until the very end.
Naw Lay Dee was having to stop every 30 seconds and rest for a minute or two before she regained her breath and could keep walking. I was really worried about her. I knew there was no way she was going to be able to get to the waterfall and we really weren’t going to get there before it got dark if we were having to stop every 30 seconds. Fortunately, a motor bike rider drove past us after we had been hiking for only 10 minutes and Zar Zar asked him if he could take Naw Lay Dee to the waterfall. Thankfully he agreed and Naw Lay Dee was set. I felt so much better and was so envious that she didn’t have to walk. In hind sight, we should have given her stuff to carry with her but we stupidly didn’t and ended up carrying the stuff all 9 km. My backpack was pretty light but I was also carrying Jo Su’s small bag because he was carrying all of Naw Lay Dee’s stuff.
So we hiked. And hiked and hiked and it was so miserable. When I finally took my backpack off at one of our resting points about an hour in, the back of my shirt was just drenched in sweat. I’ve never sweated so much in my life and I never intend to again. It was disgusting. Sweat would pour down my forehead and I just didn’t care at all. I was super thankful that I decided to wear my hat instead of my sunglasses because it kept my scalp protected. It also hid a lot of how much I was sweating.
After we had been hiking for two hours, Jo Su and Zar Zar exclaimed, “hey! we’re almost there! Just 300 more meters!” I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself from running ahead. Well, there was a translation issue because when we had definitely gone more than 300 meters and saw no waterfall, Jo Su was all like “Oh, it’s actually 3 km.” I wanted to hit him. Got my hopes up for nothing. Also, turns out he is not a very good judge at distance because we were NOT 3 km away, we were 6 km away which would take another 2 HOURS because it was so hot.
When Jo Su said we were 3 km away, we were by the 19 km post so I just set my sights on seeing the 22 km marker. Dandi and I split away from Zar Zar and Jo Su (Zar Zar had a wheely backpack and it took her a while to drag it along) and when we got to 21 km I wasn’t excited but relieved to know that we were almost done. Well. We got to the 22 km marker and THERE WAS NO WATERFALL. All we could see was more road. I was incredibly unhappy but Dandi and I were going at a good pace so we decided just to keep going and not dwell on the fact that we had no idea how much longer we had to hike. Pretty soon, another motor biker drove past and raised three fingers at us. I called after him asking if he meant 3 more km and he nodded his head. That’s when I lost it. I was so delirious from the heat that I started laughing and crying at the same time. How could this possibly be happening to us?!?! 3 MORE KM. I wasn’t going to last another step. But I did and we eventually go there. Dandi and I had some pretty interesting conversations though that I think you may enjoy. 🙂
Dandi: “Ugggg why are they making us do this? I would never make my guests do this!”
Rachel: “This is torture. That is all this is. Who goes hiking for fun?! This is what Hell must be like.”
Dandi: “This is homicide.” Rachel: “No, Dandi, suicide, we chose this.”
Dandi: “Something really good better happen to us because we didn’t do anything to deserve this!!!”
Dandi: “This is what they must make inmates in prison do.”
Rachel: “They probably don’t even make inmates walk up mountains without doing any kind of manual labor.” (again, dwelling on the fact that people hike for fun)
Those are the memorable conversations that I remember we had. I also had some interesting conversations in my head. See, before we came to Thailand, we had to buy travelers’ health insurance—which comes with medical evacuation if necessary. So after the motorbike rider told us we still had 3 km to go, I started plotting ways that I could use my medical evacuation insurance to get out of hiking the same distance the following day. There was absolutely no way that my feet were going to tolerate that. Here’s the conversation from my brain….
“I wonder if they medically evacuate you if you say you have swollen feet. Probably not. I probably will have to lie and say I sprained my ankle. Maybe they’ll just tell me to wait a few days. I’m really going to have to mess something up. It can’t be that hard to break an ankle. Maybe I’ll just jump off a small waterfall and mess up my foot and then they’ll have to evacuate me.”
I know that sounds insane, but I was seriously trying to figure out a way to break my ankle so I wouldn’t have to hike the following day. It was so hot and humid—my body was not going to do this hike twice. After trying to decide whether it was worth it to break my ankle, I came up with a list of options of how to get out of hiking the same distance the following day. This is what I came up with:
- Demand we get motor-biked back to the raft. Clearly there are people who live around the waterfall because we have seen multiple motor-bikers. Just get BWU to ask them to take them us and we’ll pay for it. I’ll pay a lot of money for a motor-bike ride.
- Lie to the medical insurance people.
- Break my ankle.
I really didn’t want it to come to come to the third option, but it was definitely an option. This conversation was going on in my mind when I was still confident that I would make it to the campsite. After 3.5 hours, I was no longer confident that my feet were going to take me that far. The extra bag from the car driver was really starting to weigh me down, and the straps of my Chacos were getting super tight around my big toe. I finally had to tell Dandi I needed to try to do something about the strap. It took a lot of pulling, but I finally was able to readjust my Chacos, which had become very hard to move because the sweat had dried the straps in place. When I was adjusting my Chacos, I considered just spending the night on the side of the road. The group would have to pass by me tomorrow and I really didn’t even care about this waterfall now. I figured, if you have seen one, you have seen them all. However, while I was sitting in the middle of the dusty road fixing my straps, munching on an oatmeal cookie, I heard something relatively large rustling in the bushes next to me. Now I hadn’t educated myself on what animals were native to the region, but I had no desire to find out by meeting one as it was trying to eat me. It was a nice boost of energy. Dandi was quite surprised as I bolted upright and started hiking fast because I had been sitting for at least 10 minutes fixing my shoes.
Eventually, and I mean eventually, we were getting close. Someone else passed us on their motorbike and they said that we were only 1 km away. I was hesitantly excited because at this point, I didn’t believe anyone’s judge of distance. I had already been lied to twice earlier (22 miles and only 3 more km). Zar Zar had gotten about 2 minutes ahead of us at some point and the guy who told us that we were only 1 km away ended up giving her a ride to the campsite. I had considered asking him but since he couldn’t take both me and Dandi, I didn’t think it was fair but ZAR ZAR GOT MOTORBIKED THE LAST BIT. She seemed pretty embarrassed when I asked later but not apologetic at all.
See the problem was that when she decided to take the motorbike, that left no one in front of me and Dandi. Jo Su was about five minutes behind us because he had to stop frequently as he was carrying the food for all the BWU people and Lay Dee’s stuff. Dandi and I got to a fork in the road and all the signs were in Thai. Nothing said “waterfall” and there was no indication from the other group about which way we were supposed to turn. I was ready for a break anyway so I plopped down and told Dandi we should wait for Jo Su. If we went the wrong way, how would we possibly know that we had gone the wrong way…we would just think that we hadn’t arrived yet.
At this point I had had a lot of water that day and I really needed to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t wait until we got to the campsite (as I didn’t have a clear idea about how far away we were) so I had to go in nature. Another reason I don’t like camping. Going to the bathroom in the woods sucks big time. I walked down one of the roads a bit but was too scared to walk into the jungle because of the relatively large thing I had heard earlier and because there were big spiders everywhere. So I found a log, sort of squat next to it and gross. It was terrible. I hate camping. Toilets are a necessity. Absolutely. And not these squat toilets everyone has in Asia. Real toilet bowls with flushes.
An unhappy Rachel returned to Dandi a minute later and we kept sitting waiting for Jo Su. I looked down and guess what was crawling all around me?! Red ants. Fantastic. At that point, I just didn’t care so I sat on my backpack, which was holding all my stuff and figured if red ants were persistent enough to climb up on it to bite me, they deserved it (they weren’t that persistent thank heavens). Jo Su finally arrived and told us to go to the right. We asked if he was sure and he said yes. We asked again and he didn’t look as confident but told us to go anyway. So Dandi and I head off while he rested and while we were still in ear shot, he called us back and told us we were going the wrong way (he had asked a passing motorbiker). If I had more energy, I would have punched him for making me walk extra steps that weren’t necessary, but I was too tired. Grudgingly, Dandi and I walked back and went the other way. He soon joined us. At one point, there was a turn that definitely looked like we should take because there was a pole to keep cars from entering when the park was closed, but Jo Su told us to keep going straight. I was ready to argue with him, but again, too tired, just wanted to sit in a shelter or whatever.
Miraculously, Dandi, Jo Su and I arrived at the campsite. It was a concrete open shelter with tables. I threw my bag pack on a table, unstrapped my sandals, put my feet up, and starting to laugh/cry again. I was so happy to finally be at the campsite.
And that’s where I will stop for now. In the first half of the journey, I could have almost died 3 times (Death Highway, Sinking Raft à eaten by something in the river, Heat exhaustion from hiking or eaten by some animal). This is quite long, I apologize. I want to make sure I remember this weekend in the future though, so I’m trying to be as detailed as possible for myself 🙂 I’ll continue the rest tomorrow, but as for now, I’m going to go read the 5th Harry Potter! I’ve already read 1-4 on this trip 🙂
I am still so thankful that I survived this weekend. While I would like to say it gets better after arriving, it really doesn’t. There were more terrifying instances when I was sure that I was going to die. All I can say is that God must have been looking over me last weekend. 🙂
rachelinthailand2013 