Charlotte's Web: Mae Chaem Day 2

This morning I woke up in my host home to the not so lovely sound of roosters crowing from about 5-7am. I noticed that the roosters here seem to be calling each other from hundreds of yards away, and instead of the normal "cock-a-doodle-doo!" these ones just "cock-a-doodle." We met up with the rest of our group at the temple and headed out for some light trekking though the farmland surrounding the village. The village is in a valley surrounded by beautiful mountains. We weaved through the crops, standing on a raised path of soil to not harm the plants on either side. Soon we approached a wooden bridge, about 100 feet across, with a new bridge under construction right next to it. When walking over the rickety bridge I had no worries about the bridge breaking. A few group members seemed nervous but I was fully confident that the bridge would hold our weight. I was very wrong. Our group of about 20 made it all the way over the bridge, but when we turned to make our way back to the side we came from the bridge decided to break. One side of the bridge lost tension and luckily everyone on the bridge was able to grab hold of the railing and carefully make their way off the bridge. I didn't want to risk attempting to make it back over the bridge like some others did so I walked about 1/4 of a mile to a calmer spot on the river to cross through the water. The whole bridge experience was pretty crazy. We all felt terrible for breaking the bridge that is heavily used by the locals, but it seemed like a lot of progress was made both repairing and building the new bridge in our short time in the village.

Upon returning to the temple we learned how to make some small crafts out of coconut plant reeds. The elderly Thai man who taught us was very talented and even made a huge crocodile out of the reed, but I just made a small fish. Later Jack and I went exploring on our own and walked through the farmlands to make our way towards a nearby monastery. The ordination building at this monastery was amazing and was surrounded by a small moat. We also stumbled upon an elderly woman spinning cotton who explained to us (in Thai) the process of making the cotton plant into yarn and somehow we were able to understand the different steps she described to us. All the farmers we passed kept asking us the same question in Thai that we couldn't understand but later found that they were asking us where we had been. We would just smile and say hello but it was amazing to see how friendly the people were and how they cared about where we were coming from and where we were going.

After dinner with our host families we went to a more urban part of Mae Chaem where we caught the tail end of a night market alongside a river. We didn't buy anything but ended up sitting with some elderly Thai locals, brother and sister, and chatted with them while sitting around a fire and enjoying the fresh bananas they gave us. Tommy acted as our translator as we told them about our time in Thailand. The old man was so sweet and kept wishing us good luck with our travels in Thailand and good luck in our future.