TRAVELING AROUND THE WORLD: Our Tales of Delights and Disasters by Shelley Row Read Free Book Online

straight and tall; bamboo, four-stories tall, bent over the trail like a green sunlit canopy. In some places, the trail crossed streams that we traversed across big and small stones. Other times, bamboo ladders lay horizontally across rocks and streams, making for a precarious but fun balancing act. After an hour, we came to the waterfall where the others were lounging on rocks by the falls. It was a beautiful and cool spot, filled with the sound of the falls. It reminded us of our smaller waterfall in Cotignac, minus the bamboo and bananas.
     
    Always looking for opportunities to sell to tourists, two women – one very old – were selling cool drinks to the dusty crowd. The old woman, skin leathery from decades in the sun, head wrapped in fabric, entranced with her sparkling eyes and distant gaze. These were eyes like my grandmother, set in the high-check-boned face of this Thai woman. Through our guide, I told her that she reminded me of my grandmother. I hope it touched her as it did me.
     
    After our walk back, we were off for white-water rafting. I was already weary and not excited. Without shoes, but with life jackets and helmets, we boarded the raft with our guide. The river was filled with round boulders as the water swooshed between. It was a thrilling ride that refreshed and revived me. Between rapids, we enjoyed the scenery of hills, huts and trees. As we neared the end, the river became wide and shallow. A mother with her naked baby played. The baby lay on its belly and kicked its feet in the shallow water, naked butt popping up.
     
    The last experience of the day was bamboo rafting. Five people on a bamboo raft are not a good plan. We floated – sort of – with the raft submerged just below the surface. Any shifting weight caused it to tip slowly side-to-side. We were drenched. The guide explained, “No wet, no fun!” We scrambled to shore, changed clothes, and started the hour-plus drive home.
     
    Exhausted and caked with layers of life – truck exhaust, snud, and dust cemented to our bodies with river water – it was a perfect day. I’ll gladly snuggle into the folds of this magic carpet and let it take me back to Chiang Mai.

Saturday, February 12, 2011
    Aladdin’s Garden
    Forget the Garden of Eden. Thailand is like Aladdin’s Garden, whose cup runneth over with flowers and food – particularly fruits of the most extraordinary kinds.
     
    To get outside of Bangkok, we took an excursion to the floating markets. The farther we drove, the more greenery we saw. Skyscrapers turned into low buildings; small parks became large fields. We nearly jumped from the moving van when we saw our first large rice paddy, complete with a worker in the field wearing a conical bamboo hat. Our astute guide and driver found a rice field where we could stop for photos. Amused, driver happily accommodated the crazy American tourists. It’s like tourists taking pictures of a corn field in Texas. No matter – we were thrilled.
     
    And Mike and I remained thrilled as we boarded a long boat for the trip through narrow canals to the floating market. Bangkok is known as the “Venice of the East.”
     
    The canals wound through coconut groves, bamboo huts, and green mangoes hanging heavy on the trees. The floating market is a series of piers where shoppers walk by perusing the vendors who are floating in long, narrow boats like canoes. The boats are lined up side-by-side, several deep, and goods and money are exchanged via a small net at the end of a long pole. Food, food and more food. Old women had boats overloaded with mangoes, pineapple, tangerines and papaya – the most familiar items – that they would slice on the spot. Then there were guava, rambutan, mangosteen and rose apple. Other women cooked inside their tiny boats and dished up foods to waiting hands. Tiny “monkey” bananas (half the size of the bananas we typically see) were fried and served hot. What looked like tiny custard pies, slightly bigger than