rtw with lucy

I’ve always prided myself on being a good mother–I have always loved and protected my girls to the best of my ability, and have even been known to turn into a mother bear on occasion.

Which is why I don’t quite understand my recent actions of this past week. Yesterday we went to a tiger temple for heaven’s sake. This is a tiger sanctuary where a group of Buddhist monks take in orphaned tigers and fix their wounds, then keep them and raise them in captivity for the rest of their lives. The tigers are supposed to be quite tame, and they certainly look tame at 2:00 in the afternoon on a day hot enough to qualify as a Missouri summer. But one can’t get around the fact that their paws are as big around as a mans upper thigh, and their head is bigger than a man’s torso. All they’d have to do is take a playful little swipe to put you into the hospital.

And then there are the warnings: Don’t wear red, pink, or orange. Don’t let in more than 4 people at a time to visit them. Don’t squat down or do anything to make yourself look smaller. Stay well back when they are walking back to their cage and be very quiet.

So I did what any mother would do. I let my children go in there and pet them. Am I crazy?!!!!

We visited a city called Kanchanaburi in Thailand. It was really one of the best places we visited. There are several things of interest in this town. First of all the town is infamous due to the Movie “The bridge over the river Kwai”-this town has a museum and cemetary related to the prisoners of war who were forced to build the ” death railroad” tracks from Thailand into Burma during WW2. The Japanese held the prisoners in camps under deplorable conditions and many many American,Dutch,English,Australian and Asians died during the war. The JEATH museum gives a history of the Japanese brutality. We were at the museum at the same time some Japanese tourists were there. Some went through in a big hurry(guilt?) and one Japanese lady seemed very overcome with emotion. We took a ride on the train that goes over the bridge and into the hills for about two hours. The scenery was beautiful and the trip made more meaningful knowing the history of the rail line. I would suggest this train trip for anybody visiting Thailand. Now about the tiger temple, outside of Kanchanaburi is a Monks temple where you can visit and actually pet full grown tigers. The monks have taken in abandoned and injured tigers and are developing a breeding program so that the tigers may be released to the wild. There is a small canyon where they take the tigers and chain them. Visitors are taken one by one(holding hands) with a trainer and are allowed to get down to tiger level and pet the tiger and have pictures taken. Crazy as it sounds it seems safe but we were still nervous about letting Erin and Lucy do it. But we did and below are some pictures. The complex also has other animals and one time a day the monks throw out food in the street and hundreds of cows,wild pigs, horses, peacocks,barking deer,goats all feed together. The strange zoo is also expanding and eventually there will be natural habitat for the tigers to run free in. We did enjoy the experience- we had read stories on the internet that the tigers were drugged and not very well cared for but we did not observe this. The tigers were lazy and mostly laid down but cats do this anyway in the heat of the day- nothing out of the ordinary. Tiger temple is grrrrreat! Gene

We’re in Thailand now and have been here a week. Bangkok is one big noisy smelly city, and our guidebook warned us to watch out for tuk tuk drivers, as they will generally try to drive you to a jewelry shop and collect a commission from the shop, which will try to talk you into buying gems. These are generally scams, as the gems are often fake. We were determined to avoid this, but late in the afternoon of the first day we were here, we were hot, very tired, and wondering which way to go next. We made the mistake of stopping on the sidewalk to consult our map, when a very friendly gentleman approached us and asked if we needed help. We didn’t really, but got into conversation with him and he just mentioned in passing that the bright green tuk tuks were sanctioned by the government TAT (Thai Authority of Tourism) office and that they wouldn’t pull any funny business. Then he left, and a bright green tuk tuk just happened to pull up and offer us a ride to the TAT office, which was a place we needed to go, so we made a deal and got in. It was a hair raising experience, because a tuk tuk is just basically a small ricketty cart pulled by a motorcycle, and you can barely get 4 people in besides the driver.

In about 15 minutes we arrived at the TAT office, a very official looking brick building with a big gold TAT in front. We went in to ask some general questions, and the next thing we knew, we were signed up for an island trip and booked into a couple of resorts. This was not exactly what we had in mind, though we had planned to visit the beaches in southern Thailand. The price was not excessive though, and we felt we had made a good decision. After that, we left with our tuk tuk driver to visit a temple.

The temple was beautiful, but when we had seen it, we asked the driver to take us back to our hotel, since it was getting late in the afternoon and we had pulled an all nighter the night before. He looked about ready to cry and said that if we did that, he would not get the commission from the jewelry shop he was planning to take us to. This aroused our sympathy, so we agreed to go, figuring we’d go have a quick look and then leave. Wrong.

We were greeted at the door by 3 beautiful Thai ladies in silk dresses who put their hands into a prayer position and bowed to us as they said, “Sawasdee kah!” This was very impressive, but I hardened my heart. Then we were led into a huge, brand new, and very professional looking building, and I had an inkling that this would not be an easy thing to escape. The atmosphere inside was hushed and we were handed off to a man in a business suit, who took us into the gem cutting room to peer through a microscope and see that the gems are real. They knew we had heard the warnings about the fake jewels and wanted to be sure that we understood that we were dealing with professionals.

Once he managed to convince us that this was the real thing, he handed us off to a lady salesperson, also in a business suit. She was very kind, and very friendly and showed us racks and racks of different rings while she tried to figure out what we were interested in. (Nothing.) We stayed as long as was humanly polite, which was about 15 minutes longer than we originally intended, then muttered excuses and made for the door. Her attitude went from warm to frosty, and we were sternly told that we could not go out the front door but had to go out the side door, which sounded even better, until we realized that this took us through another huge store which was full of very nice things like handcarved teak tables and beautiful china sets and many other things that we had no intention of buying. By this time we were practically running, but that didn’t discourage another lady from trying to make a sale. She ran after us calling, “But look at this table, look at this china set, look at this. . .” She chased us all the way to the door, but fortunately left off after we got outside. Our tuk tuk driver was very disappointed in us for not buying anything but we were too tired to care, though we gave him some extra money for his pains when he got us safely delivered.

Our trip was scheduled for a couple of days hence, and we reread the warnings about tuk tuk drivers, and resolved to never take another one in Bangkok. But as we went around the city, we noticed that the TAT logo was on quite a few buildings, and we also heard that a lot of unscrupulous travel agencies would identify themselves as the TAT, and we really began to worry that we’d been had. I took the precaution of having copies made of all the receipts, but still worried that we’d lost our money. My mood went back and forth as I weighed the evidence for honesty and theft, and it wasn’t looking too good. I imagined telling everyone at home that it all started with a tuk tuk ride. . .

The bus we were to take was an all night luxury bus with air con. It was a double decker and we had to get a shuttle ride over to it. I felt better about the whole thing when we got on the shuttle, but worse when he dropped us off in the middle of a busy street that most definitely did not look like a bus stop. Then when we noticed other travellers starting to gather there we felt better again. And someone came out and counted us all, so I felt even better. Then they led us around a half a block to where some big buses were and had us stand there, but didn’t explain anything, and then all the buses loaded up and left, and I began to worry again that it was all a fraud. After waiting awhile longer, they led us around another half block again, and there we began to load onto a bus. Ahh. Maybe this was for real after all.

The bus ride. Well, where do I begin on that one? It was decorated very colorfully in a party pink and passion purple theme. It was colder than a butcher’s freezer, and they played R rated American movies for the next several hours, with all the lights off, so we had no choice but to watch them. The first one was a Miami Vice type thing with scads of F-words thrown in for effect, but the second one was totally tasteless, totally nasty, and pretty funny, so that there was no way to keep the girls from watching it. Let’s just say that it was part of their homeschooling. No, let’s not. But they did get educated. I told them later that it was everything that I didn’t want them to know, rolled up into one very stupid movie.

There was a door to our part of the bus which was to be kept shut, but it soon became evident that the door knob was broken and the door would not open without great effort. We pointed it out to the bus conductor, but he couldn’t fix it. The rest of the night was a back and forth “fight” about keeping the door open or shut. Finally he gave up and just locked us in–away from the bathroom and creating a nightmare of a fire hazard. We were a very disgruntled bunch who finally disembarked into a dirt road at 5:30 a.m.–cold, hungry, tired, and lined up for the bathroom.

After about an hour and a half, a songthaew (a pickup truck with 2 rows of seats in the back), pulled up, and took us several miles to a shabby van, where we were loaded up again, and at least it was a bus that gave us a ride to where we were going, and it remained to be seen how the hotel room was going to be. We arrived at about 11:00 in the morning to a cool glass of fresh orange juice served in an oasis like setting deep in a rainforest glade. The room was shaded and lovely and the pool was a clear blue. Yes. We were in business, and everything was exactly as the travel agent had described it. We found out later that everything in the area was indeed booked up and we could not have done it better by ourselves, so I guess we weren’t too stupid after all, though we came by all of it rather unintentionally. Stephanie

The Hike

Yesterday we took a boat ride in Milford Sound and it was magnificent. But you’ve seen the pictures.

After we left Milford Sound, we decided that we would stop at the first trail we could find, despite the fact that we’d not managed to get info on any of them. We were very close to the world famous Milford Trail, the one that takes about a week to hike, that you have to register for about a year in advance, then pay a lot of money to do. We didn’t do that.

We stopped at one called Grave-Talbot Trail. After we piled out of the car and started up the trail we knew we were in trouble because it headed straight up–a vertical 5 feet. The girls were losing heart. I wanted to check it out at least, so up we clambered up in the mud. Then we were confronted by a lake. It was right in the middle of the trail. I still wanted to go on, so we sidled around that and right into a peat bog. The whole trail was like that, though it did seem as if stepping stones were placed conveniently in our reach, and it was a challenge to keep our feet dry, but we almost succeeded. Actually it was a lot of fun to work out how to place our feet next, and how to keep dry, and though it would have been fun to say, “to heck with it”, and get our feet wet anyway, it was more challenging to try to stay clean. The best part was getting up and down the climbs and the drops, and everything was so green. There was not one thing that was not green. Even the trunks of the trees were covered with moss, as were all the big boulders. There must have been 150 different kinds of moss, and anything that wasn’t moss was a fern.

When we got back to the car, my pants were muddy and wet up to the ankles and I was not ready to quit. It was the best hike of my life, though certainly the most difficult. In conversation with a lady from NZ that evening, I discovered that the Milford track is much worse, as there are sections of trail where you have to wade in water up to your waist. Maybe next time and without the kids. Stephanie

Well, I have to say that I did not enjoy it very much.
I saw the 5 foot climb, and immediately despaired. We said, “are you sure you want to do this mom????” “Yes” was the answer. I groaned.
“But we are going to get all wet and muddy!!!!” I cried.
Mom didn’t care.
“It’ll be beautiful” she said.
Well, we started in on our hike, and every available surface was full of mud and water.
I think I nearly fell in 20 times. Well, we were hiking (or sidling) for a while, and we came to a 6 foot drop. “ I think this would be a good place to stop” protested my sister. And I joined in with her.
“Well, lets just go a bit farther” said mom.
I started protesting quite loudly then.
(Erin didn’t say anything, But I knew she was agreeing with me)
“Well, you guys are just a bunch of wimps” argued my mother,”I’m going to keep going”.
Well we had to go with her.
We were walking for a while ( me protesting all the way) when mom said “OK, (sigh) I guess we can turn back now.”
Under my breath I gave a great big sigh of relief.
I did get my foot all wet on the way back, but besides that, it was uneventful.
I survived it, and for that we went out and got ice cream later on.

-Lucy S.

Yesterday we took The Hike to end all hikes. It started out with a muddy wall, which we were supposed to climb with the help of a mossy tree vine. The “track” was a half dried (or half wet) stream bed. Now I know what wading boots are for.
The whole trail was an obstacle course, and we were the rats(who apparently hate water). We had to find numerous other “options” around small lakes, and do a little bit of accidental wading.
Hopping across slippery rocks and tree trunks was fun, until someone fell into the boggy water we were trying to avoid,which we all did in turn.
Vast parts of the trail were under water, so we had to fight our way through tree ferns, vertical and horizontal moss carpeting, and dripping tree branches. Sometimes we hopped from one slippery moss-encrusted rock to another, or did balancing acts across tree trunks. All of the above offered the quirky plan B of falling in muddy water if you stepped in the wrong place. Mom found this terribly exciting.
I don’t think I’m ready for the Milford Track yet, as it’s supposed to be worse.
-Erin Sappington ————————————————————— I saw the trailhead and thought-surely this must be the wrong way? A steep climb up over rocks,roots and moss which then led into- you guessed it; moss,rocks,roots and water. Water everywhere. The trail was in reality a creek that had been given the name of a walking trail. It looked like something out of Jurassic park. Ferns everywhere- I kept waiting for giant dragonflies to scoop me up and carry me off into some lair so I could be eaten at their leisure. But all kidding aside the temperate rain forest was (wet)- and slippery and not nearly as warm as a Florida waterpark in summer. We climbed up and over rain soaked spongy moss, fought off clouds of sand flies, slipped and fell into bogs up to our necks- Oops, I mean ankles, and then started the trail. I will never forget those famous words spoken throughout our tramp-Daaddd! when are we turning back? I kept saying -in a few minutes, in a few minutes-(I wish I had a tape recorder) for as many times as I said this. Then finally the glorious time when I said- Okay kids, you have suffered enough- lets turn back. Erin and Lucy would have fallen to their knees but we would have probably lost them in the bog- so they just screamed- Thank God! They actually thought the hike was cool and so did I, but we had to keep up our whining so as to not have their mother think we really liked it. Gene

Here are some of the highlights of our visit:

*Visited Christchurch, a beautiful city with gardens and old looking English style buildings and the river Avon flowing through it
*drove out to Akaroa, a french historical village. We rode bikes around the beach and the lovely gardens
*walked out off Otago Peninsula and almost missed seeing a fur seal colony–there were about 30 of them lounging around on the rocks, and each seemed to know just which color rock to lay on to best camouflage itself.
*stayed in Dunedin–this town has the loveliest network of city parks I’ve ever seen–there are miles and miles of walking trails in them
*took a boatride out from Milford Sound in the rain–the only way anyone will ever see MS because they get an average of 18 feet of rain per year!
*rainforest hikes
*whitewater rafting at Buller Gorge
*drove into Queenstown, then right back out again when we saw all the tourists–the nerve of all those people to go where we wanted to go! Went to Wanaka instead.
*abseiling with Lucy
*horseback riding for Dad and Erin
*sea kayaking in Abel Tasman National Park
*We went to see the World of Wearable Art Museum and Classic Cars Museum in Nelson. This is the same museum, with something for everyone. The wearable art is indescribable, and I will try to post a link.
*soaked up a couple of hours at the hot springs in Hanmer Springs–it was perfect, the day was cold and drizzly, and the springs were so warm. . .

Well, those are the highlights, and we’re a bit worn out, and are kicking back in our own apartment in Auckland, which feels like a palace after tent camping for so long.
Mom

Well, we’ve just almost completed our whirlwind tour of the South Island of New Zealand, and it was not very much like Oz at all. For one thing, the only animals we’ve seen here have been introduced, except maybe the fur seal. There are lots and lots of sheep here, and NZ has just as much problems with rabbits as Australia, if not more.

The problem is, everything they bring in here just thrives. The roses are the biggest and best anywhere. The dahlias are as big as dinner plates. Fruit trees grow wild everywhere, as well as in the gardens. This is interesting in light of the fact that before the Europeans came, there was almost nothing to eat. The only native land mammal was the bat, for heaven’s sake. There were a few plants that provided food, but all were labor intensive to prepare, so I get the impression that the Maoris mainly confined themselves to seafood and the sweet potatoes that they brought with them from somewhere in Polynesia. (note: if you are a Kiwi, and you know better, please correct me, as this is all gathered from hearsay.) They had tried to bring pigs and chickens, but somehow these were lost and they were cut off from prior contact, so the place, beautiful and productive as it is now, just didn’t grow much beyond mosses and ferns. The moa bird, which is something like an ostrich, only twice as big (no really), were eaten very quickly, and I’m wondering if it’s because they tasted good, or because they were threatening? I mean, what if they had a disposition somewhat similar to that of a goose? I guess I should go back and mention that the Maoris came over here around 1000 A.D., and before that there were no people in NZ at all, so it is the last land mass of any size to be settled.

Well all, we are about to head off to the enchanting land of Thailand.
But, right now we are in the comfort of our three bedroom flat.
We are going to be in Auckland for 3 days, then fly out.
We had a few hectic moments in the airport on the way here, but I wont go into details so as to protect the privacy of certain members of the family.
Anyway, cheerieo,wish us luck, Au revoir, all the best,
Sappington

We learned long ago that it is unnecessary to plan exotic vacations. We learned to let them happen. Planned exotic vacations can become very expensive. We learned that all we need to do is plop ourselves down someplace where we would be “at risk,” and something will probably happen. It may be the unexpected, the unconventional, the odd, the rare, the grotesque, the bizarre, or the exotic. Part of the trick is to be perceptive and detect the grotesque, the bizarre or the exotic and be equal to the opportunity. It is somewhat like learning to see the beauty of the desert. Henry Troyer from “Tales from Paths Less Trodden”.

It’s the dryest, flattest, hottest, most infertile and climactically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life–a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Oz has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else. Bill Bryson

Shove off from the shore
and set the ship’s sails
The seven seas shudder with
squalls and strong gales
And six sailors shout, their
shrill and sharp wails
of “sails-ho southwards
The Spanish Main hails!”
tongue twister from Pirates Ho special display at Sydney Maritime Museum

Everything is risky. If you’re looking for absolute safety, you chose the wrong species. You can stay home in bed–but that may make you one of the half-million Americans who require emergency room treatment each year for injuries sustained while falling out of bed. You can cover your windows-but that may make you one of the ten people a year who accidentally hang themselves on the cords of their venetian blinds. You can hide your money in a mattress–but that may make you one of tens of thousands of the people who go to the emergency room each year because of wounds caused by handling money–everything from paper cuts to (for the wealthy), hernias. John Ortberg from “If You Want to Walk on Water You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat”

This much is true though: I see the world as a series of clues that somehow explain the universe. Pachyderms and narwhals, talipot trees and insect-eating plants, flightless birds and boa constrictors–all are a part of some cryptic message that needs to be deciphered if we are to encounter its wholeness.
James Cowan from “A Mapmaker’s Dream-the meditations of Fra Mauro, cartographer to the court of Venice”

How to do the Aussie salute: take you hand and wave it around your face as if to shoo a fly off your nose. This in fact is what you are doing since the flies take many liberties with your face, such as divebombing your eyes, using your nose as a landing pad, and trying desperately to crawl into your mouth.

While they have some of the most venomous snakes and spiders and jelly fish and sharks and many other critters we don’t even know about, and we must respect them for that, the fact is that they think we must be pretty tough to put up with grizzly bears and tornadoes. Little do they know that Erin got chased down by an emu on our own little country road one day!

The crime rate here is very low, with almost no violent crime. We have not heard about one murder in the news since we got here. Most Aussies feel that they can go anywhere in their own country without worrying about it too much.

They have fewer weight problems than we do in the states, though they are catching up. I’d say they are about 20 years behind us in this. They see us as a country of many fast food restaurants and have the impression that this is mainly what we eat. The interesting thing though–when Europeans come here, they gain weight, depite the exercise, and when we came here, we lost weight. Hmm.

Australia is in the midst of a nationwide drought. The only area unaffected just happens to be the dryest place here anyway. This drought has been going on for over five years and they are beginning to think that they will have to take some extreme measures soon to ensure that they will continue to have drinking water. Right now a fight is on about whether to start building seawater desalination plants. In many places they can’t wash their cars or fill their pools, and we even heard a rumor about a place restricting people to a shower every other day. Also, one day we drove to a national park, only to find that it was completely closed to the public due to a fire ban.

Most of us know that Oz is a dry country in the middle, with most of the population concentrated on the coast line, and this is true. In some places, you only need to drive about 30 miles or less to get into the outback, like Queensland, and in SE Australia, you would need to go in much further. There are some places around the coast where you won’t see a house for miles, though it is forested. That’s because much of the coastal land is in national parks.

An interesting thing about the topography is that within a square mile you can have pockets of rainforest. Many times we have taken a walk that started out in a dry eucalypt forest, then descended into rainforest, then back into dry forest and then into grassland. We have all these changes too–they just don’t happen so quickly. In some of the rainforests there is a tree called a “lilly pilly tree”. Even the rainforests have eucalypt trees though.

My Country by Dorothea MacKellar

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins;
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies–
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains;
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror–
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die–
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thristy paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze. . .

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land–
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand–
Though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.