Chiang Mai, Thailand - Thai Cooking Class

John, Kyle and I had signed up for a Thai cooking class. Unfortunately John was sick during the night and not able to take the class, or in fact, not even able to talk about food. The lady who signed us up for the class, Boo Boo (same as Yogi bear's sidekick), was very nice and refunded his money even though the receipt had a big "No Refunds!" stamped on it.

The class was next door to our hotel. It was very well organized. There were four staff people helping the 6 of us taking the class, four Canadians, Kyle and myself. We started off taking a taxi to the market and learning about some of the items we would be using in the food we'd be making and purchasing some of them.

When we returned we donned aprons and chefs hats and the fun began. The main chef would demonstrate how to make the dish and then we would go to our cooking stations and prepare the same dish. We sampled the items we made and they were wrapped for us to take with us later on.

We first prepared green curry, starting with hand making the green curry paste. The ingrediants were supplied to us. We then chopped them up very finely and used a mortar and pestle to make them into a curry paste. This was the most demanding part of the cooking class. It took about 30-minutes to make the paste, but the results were worth it. We then
went to our stations and made the green curry dish after seeing our lead chef make it. The dishes we made were:

Green Curry (served with rice)
Sweet and Sour Chicken (served with rice)
Pad Thai with Prawns (Thai fried noodles)
Banana in Syrup (dessert)
Springs Rolls (appetizer)
Tom Yum Kung (soup)

It was amazing how much we learned and how fine a job they did of organizing and teaching us. Along the way we had a lot of fun and a lot of food! The course cost about $18 US, but we also had all our meals for the day and the next morning from the food we made.

Back at the room we joined John and watched the Jetsons on TV. The Jetsons cartoon character voices were dubbed in Thai. It was quite amusing to see and hear.

I managed to pick up the same bug that John got. It mostly affected my stomach, so I wasn't able to take advantage of the leftover Thai food I had cooked.

Chiang Mai, Thailand - River Rafting

The minivan picked John, Kyle and I up about 9:30 a.m. to travel to the Mae Tang River for river rafting. The A/C in the van was broken, but with windows open, it wasn't a bad 2-hour trip to the put in. The last part of the road was dirty and muddy. It paralleled the river. We had to stop a couple of times to maneuver around people taking elephant rides. I guess it was deemed a multi-use highway.

Our guide was a small Thai man named Dang. He was very cheerful and spoke the little English he knew, related to what needed to know about rafting, very well. The commands were:

"On the job!" - meaning get into standard paddling positions
"In the boat" - we're going over something big, duck into the boat and hold on for dear life!

As well as the standard:

Paddle, 1,2,1,2,...
Backpaddle
Left forward, right back...
etc.

The river was abnormally high, and though normally classed grade 4, a couple of the rapids were at least grade 4+ and probably a solid grade 5. Dang had us practice maneuvers well ahead of the big rapids. Even so, the first set of rapids was a shock. We rounded a corner and all of sudden the bottom dropped out of the river. We saw the treeline framed by a horizontal edge of water that looked like the top of a dam. At the top of the "dam" all we could see was a jumbled mass of boulders with water swirling around them forming waves, hydraulics and whirlpools with fallen trees strewn in between.

Dang deftly commanded and maneuvered us around the obstacles with only one of our paddlers losing a paddle in the process. A young Thai boy dove into the turbulent water above the next set of rapids to retreive it and hand it back to us.

Chiang Rai, Thailand - Elephant rides and Village Trek

We left about 9:30 a.m. and headed to the elephant camp to ride elephants as the first part of our trek. There are about 35-elephants available for rides. Before riding them, we bought some bananas and pineapples to feed them. Some of them were quite aggressive in seeking out the treats. At at one point I had three elephant trunks probing me for the food I had purchased.

We ascended the loading platform and boarded our elephants, John and Kyle on one, me on another. Each elephant had a Thai mahout driver that rode either behind or in front of the elephant's ears. The mahout let me ride on on the elephants neck behind the ears for a short time and I found it was not mean feat to stay balanced. I used my hands on the elephants head to help balance. I might have been able to hold onto the elephants ears, but with no instructions about what's safe to hold onto, I didn't want to risk it.

As we left the loading area it was interesting to pass electric poles and buildings and equivalent to the 2nd floor in height. The ride is slow and plodding, but the view is quite nice. Trying to take pictures from an elephant is quite challenging, but I did manage to get a few decent shots of John and Kyle and surrounding scenery.

After riding the elephants, we crossed the river and rode in our guides' (Kai's) truck to village where we would start our trek. It was pouring rain, se we held up for a few minutes until it let up before starting. Kai took us on a dirt road to the usual route he would take to the village through the woods. Unfortunately the water had risen so high that we could not cross a stream at the beginning of the trail. We had to take the more travelled, villager's route to the village.

The trail had the stickiest mud I have ever encountered. I was wearing Teva type sandals and had a 3" fringe of mud tenaciously clinging to the outer sides and about of 1" or more of mud clinging underneath the sandals. I was walking with huge clods of sod stuck to your feet. I used a stick very so often to detach some of the mud, but it was fairly useless, it would accumulate again almost instantly. It was a long trek to village!

Kai did help to break up the journey by entertaining us with various things.

My Mother passes away at 2:30 a.m. on July 23rd...
The last three weeks have been the most difficult of my life, dealing with the rapid mental and physical health decline of my mother as the cancer progressed.

Everything happened so quickly...
June 23rd: My mother goes to South Shore Hospital for high contrast MRI/CT scans
June 26th: I start my journey back to Scituate from Bangkok
June 27th: I arrive in Scituate, my cousin takes me to see my Mom at the hospital
June 30th: My mother comes back home and I care for her with help from family/friends
July 1: I initiate a 24-hr. schedule of Home Health Aides to attend for my Mom
July 16th: My Mom is now sleeping most of the time with short intervals of semiconsciousness.
July 17th: I make the decision to transfer my Mom to a nursing home
July 18th: I begin my journey back to Bangkok
July 19th: My mother is transferred to Queen Anne's nursing home in Hingham
July 23rd: My Mom passes comfortably in her sleep at 2:30 a.m.

I loved my Mom very much.

I am eternally grateful for the family and friends that have supported me during this time. Amoung them my cousins Tilla and Bob Cahill, my cousin Ric Bailey, my aunt Madeleine Von Iderstein, my cousin Connie Zweifel, my cousin Sally Keefe and my friends: Tony Middendorff, Trevor Hawkins, Glenn Cooper and Jeff Hopkins. They helped me make it through it. There are many friends of my mother and myself that have helped a great deal and visited as well. Thank you all!