Today was our last day in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Tomorrow we will be flying back to Singapore before continuing our adventures around the world. Because of this, I spent some time taking pictures and video footage of the landscape and nature around our hotel.

That picture above is a nice view of the beautiful scenery, and below you can see the little pond in front of the pool. Naturally, with so much water everywhere there were mosquitoes!

And since it was a Sunday, Grace did a video blog about the currency markets. You can watch it here.

Thailand has a unique culture and most of the people we encountered are friendly. Income though, seems to be very low for most people here, and we saw many villages that look like they haven’t changed much in the past few thousand years. One sharp contrast we saw however, was that even in villages where people live in bamboo houses with thatched roofs, they have satellite dishes, tv antennas and solar panels (no internet or computers though), all part of the (previous) government’s effort to bring technology to rural areas.

Tourism also seems to have dropped a lot since the coup, and that has brought hardship to some people who depend on it for a living, so we hope it picks up again soon.

People’s cultures vary so widely from place to place. It’s very interesting to see what traditions people hold dear and how absurd they may seem to us, mainly because, other people may be thinking the same about traditions we hold dear.

In the White Karen village for example, girls and women that are unmarried have to wear white. Once they’re married (sometimes as young as 13 or 14), then they can wear other colors like red or blue. They also require the bride’s wife to give a pig to the husband’s family as dowry so all families who have daughters have to also keep pigs! Maybe it’s a secret revenge by the women in the tribe, saying the men are pigs for making them wear white till they’re married.

Another odd tradition is the metal waist band (see picture above) worn by the Palong tribe women. By wearing that they hope that they won’t be considered a candidate for heaven and thus won’t die!

Or what about the Long Neck Karen girls who have metal rings placed around their necks since they are around 5! They only remove these rings once a year to add a new ring till they have a total of 25-27 rings! What these rings do is push their collar bones down and make them look like they have an elongated neck! Doing this to children seems abusive to me!

And why does it seem like most of these restrictive traditions involve women?

When you’re staying in the countryside, surrounded by paddy fields, where you can hear the sounds of crickets, the chirping of the birds, and the occasional mooing of a water buffalo, what do you think of doing?

“Let’s film you reading your book in this great setting,” I told Grace this morning. So we setup the tripod near the pool and she sat down on one of the comfy pool chairs and we filmed a little reading of her book.

I wanted to put it up today, but then we had a problem that has to do with being in the countryside. The internet doesn’t work well. The wireless network in the hotel is down and they say that it might be fixed tomorrow so I’m posting this through another wireless network I found. Since this is the countryside with little around I can only guess how far away this other network is. And since it’s so far, it’s VERY slow and disconnects every few minutes so I can’t upload a video today.

Tomorrow we’re off to the hill tribes, including the long-neck Karen who stretch their necks out by placing rings around it since they are young. Hard to believe it’s still legal here! We’ll tell you all about it tomorrow!

As evolution has shown, survival is not only of the fittest, but more importantly of the most adaptable! And traveling the world is definitely one of those things that requires a lot of adaptability. First of all, when traveling the world we have to stay in a different hotel room and sleep on different beds, and each room can take some getting used to.

“I don’t like to keep wearing the same clothes” is something Grace always tells me, to which I usually retort “who ends up carrying the suitcase?” But in the end we come to a compromise, and the suitcase is heavier than I would like, and has less clothes than Grace would like.

Here’s Grace adapting to the environment by working from a poolside bed facing a field of rice paddies. Wouldn’t you just dread doing that. hehe

Some things though can be changed. For example, in this trip we’ve only brought one laptop with us, but we’ve realized that it’s very difficult to get our work done, go exploring, and get enough sleep, if we have to keep passing the laptop back and forth for us to work on. So we’ll have to get another one that’s light for traveling the world. That just means one more thing to carry and one more thing to look out for. But we need it.

If you’re wondering why we haven’t posted videos for a few days it’s because of the laptop issue. Editing a video takes time, and uploading it from the middle of nowhere can take even more, so we need a dedicated laptop for that!

Oh yeah, while Grace was hogging the laptop I was busy taking pictures and filming the surroundings. And then, out of the sky came a bright light, as bright as the sun, (maybe because it was the sun) and I photographed it! Don’t you just hear the choir music in the background.