Day 41: Romyen

More farang (white foreigner) shenanigans today, although the community is still debating whether I am a farang or not.
Today Kayla actually had to work, so Andy and I headed to the hills to do what we had been explained to as “planting.” We biked to the office to meet our two escorts at 8am. Of course we didn’t leave until about 8:30, and then we were off! In a pickup truck with two men who barely spoke any English, whizzing through gorgeous hills as we slowly gained altitude.

At times the driving got a bit perilous as our driver shifted gears while going up a steep incline, but eventually we pulled onto a paved road marked by a life size portrait of the king and queen. Did you know this is my first country with a reigning royal family? Anyway, their portraits are everywhere here, and some of the are quite hilarious. If I were queen I would definitely only choose attractive pictures of myself to post around my country.

Regardless, we walked up the hill into this village and realized we were at some sort of ceremony. Of course with no translations we really had no idea what was going on, but there were about 25 guys in military uniforms, 10 hill tribe people, maybe 15 school children and a handful of other non-uniformed adults present. We signed in and were handed a pair of purple chopsticks as some sort of welcome gift I presume. No one knew why we were there and we had no idea why we were there, we had just wanted to go to the hills. A tea ceremony, hill tribe dance and a few speeches later and they were handing out plants!

Probably for the fact that he is a farang, Andy was pulled up to receive his own seedling.

We planted them around the grassy space, or rather the guys who had received plants and the school children planted as I and the others took pictures. Then the trucks were loaded up with tons of other seedlings and we went to a giant hillside and started planting them. We planted for an hour for so, and you know, it’s rather hard to plant things on an extremely steep hill! I am doubtful that the plants will survive as the ground was mostly clay, but I do wish them the best of luck with the venture.

After I’m pretty sure our companions told everyone we were really really tired, the four of us went back to the village and ate a communal lunch of rice, bamboo soup and greens + meat. It was wonderful to eat with chopsticks again as I really don’t like eating noodles and rice with my hands.

Then we left, after another excuse about the tired farangs I think, and went to the Pae Dang Cave which was pretty cool. There were tons of bats, bat poop, and a few Buddhist statues inside, but we weren’t allowed to wander back very far as we were using one guy’s iPhone as a flashlight. Post that adventure more biking to the bus station to buy our ticket to Bangkok, then over to the Tesco supermarket, saw an old Burmese Wat with pretty dark wood, biked in the rain clutching my straw hat to my head and bought a huge bunch of bananas for 15 Baht. So…50 cents. Promptly ate two with peanut butter. Good day.