Camping!

Role Call: Davide, Jeab, Hilary, Ilona, Tony and Nick
The ever-frightening cows...

The Ladies rocking out the camp kitchen...
The guys also contributed to the work....
La cooking on the fire. Looks pretty intense!

Last weekend we had the opportunity to go camping for the first time in Thailand. Our friend La is from a village outside of Lampang and his family has some land. It was mostly soy bean and rice fields with a little stream flowing through it. Hilary and I managed to find a tent on sale and we set up camp as well as a couple of hammocks. In the afternoon we sat around chopping veggies for dinner and asking each other questions from these conversation books that Nadine has. Meanwhile the guys were supposed to be gathering wood for the fire but ended up getting into a log-throwing contest. Some of La's friends came out for dinner and we taught the Thais how to make smores. They showed us a Thai fireside treat which consists of balls of sticky rice dipped in egg and salt and then roasted in the fire. Quite nice! We played Mad Libs and told stories. Not really ghost stories but just funny stories. La told us a story about some crows and a scarecrow which was interesting. I lounged quite a bit in the hammock and then decided to practice some poi, which is fire twirling/dancing. La and a couple of our other friends are amazing at this. They had the "practice poi" which are tennis balls on the end of chains. You twirl them in patterns around your body and you know what? It is not easy. I thought it would be a breeze but i ended up hitting myself with those stupid balls a million times. I hope to practice more on Koh Tao...fire dancing is such an island thing here. So we went to bed only to discover that it was freezing cold and hilary and I had only brought one blanket apiece. We barely slept at all just chattering our teeth and trying to maximize body heat. I couldn't believe how different it was being just outside the city!

In the morning we made breakfast and Nadine went down to wash the dishes in the creek only to be met by a cow-herd and his herd. One cow started approaching Nadine and she started shrieking and running away. We all laughed so hard because that cow was definitely spooking Nadine out. We hope that we can make this a regular outing because it was the perfect chill activity for a 3-day weekend.