Sea Glass Kids: Inner Thailand Trips [Joshua Burke]

This last Sunday we decided to go on a tour to ride elephants, go river rafting, visit the tsunami museum, and to visit a monkey temple. These attractions were not in Phuket, but in the province to the East. It only took an hour and a half to get there by van and they were all very fun. We had nice tour guide and the tour group planned the entire day out.

The misty landscape

Our guide telling us about the tsunami.

The first thing that we did was to go to the tsunami museum. In 26/12/2004 an earthquake that measured 9.3 on the Richter scale triggered a tsunami that hit Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Malaysia, Burma, Bangladesh, Somalia, Tanzania, and Kenya. It left about 300,000 people dead. In Thailand alone 5,321 people were killed and 8,457 people were injured. The wave was over 10 m (30ft) high and caused may billions of dollars of damage. It swept boats all the way inland and destroyed towns.

A police boat that was swept in all the way to here by the tsunami.

The elephant camp was out in the jungle and luckily it had just stopped raining hard so we didn’t get wet. As we were riding on the elephant, it would stop and take huge palm fronds off trees and snap them in half with its trunk, and then eat them. I thought it was amazing how strong their tusks are. Riding on an elephant is a lot of fun, and especially when you get to feed the elephants bananas. When we were all done riding the elephants James gave 100 baht to a baby elephant, and it went to the counter and bought bananas for its self. It even played the harmonica as a thank you.

Me at the elephant camp.

On the elephant.

Me feeding the elephants bananas

James on the baby elephant

After riding the elephants we took a break and had some lunch at a local restaurant. As soon as we got under the roof, it started raining like crazy. When the rain stopped we then proceeded to the bamboo rafts that we were going to take down a river. It then started to rain again, but luckily our tour guide gave us ponchos so we weren’t soaked. It is currently the rainy season here so the river was higher then usual and the current was stronger. Unfortunately we didn’t see monkeys, or any wildlife for that matter. They were probably all hiding in their homes. When we arrived at our stop by the river we walked up a path to these amazing limestone caves. They looked pretty old and there were people’s signatures on some parts of the limestone. We didn’t get to explore the caves which was too bad. But our rafter boiled some water in bamboo and made tea with it. They then served it with bamboo cups.

Our last stop was the monkey temple, which had tons of monkeys. They were so hilarious. We bought some food for them and fed them bananas, peanuts, and corn. I threw some corn up and they caught it in midair hanging upside down from a tree branch. The temple is inside a cave formation and there was a big, reclining Buddha inside. On one part of the cave’s wall there were signatures of the Siam’s (Thailand’s) kings. The oldest signature went back to 1827.