Jackie's World Tour 2009 – Let the mayhem begin!

Ok, so I am resigned to the fact that I am really bad at updating my blog! Yep, I have been consistent at letting at least a month go by in between blogs. Guess that is a good things since I am usually so busy that I don’t have time to update!

Well since I last left you, my trusty readers, I was off to Phuket, Thailand to get my butt kicked everyday by a bunch of tiny Thai dudes! There is only one word to describe my experience at Rawai Muay Thai….AMAZING!!! I absolutley loved every minute of it, well almost every minute of it. It was totally what my mind and body needed. I wish that I had more time to stay there longer. I really loved being physically abused on a daily basis. Training consisted of 2-5 rounds of shadow boxing, 5 rounds of padwork with a trainer, 5 rounds of bagwork (did mention that we also had to do 10-20 push-up’s in between rounds?) and then about an hour of technique. Depending on the day, we worked on different techniques ranging from kicks, blocks, punches, clinching (grappling), sparring and wai cru. It was alot of ass kicking smashed into 2-3 hours! And then after all of that we did 200 knees and 200 push kicks on the bag and 150 situps. We did this 2x a day. The morning session started at 7:30 and the afternoon session started at 4:00. It was really intense! So the days kind of looked like this: wake up, train, shower, eat breakfast, go back to room and sleep, wake up and train, shower, eat dinner, pass out in exhasution and wake up the next day and do it all over again. As the weeks progressed, I actually took shorter naps and this awesome guy Martin, started meeting me at 12 and I did weight training. I basically lived, ate and breathed Muay Thai for the month! I met so many amazing people at Rawai (that was the gym). It was so much better than I expected. Now I know that it sounds very boring but I did do other stuff besides just train. Training was Monday through Saturday so on Saturday night lots of people from the gym often went to Freedom Bar to get their drink on. It was always alot of fun. I did do a tiny bit of exploring around Phuket as well. Most of my exploring was done on the back of a scooter and I have come to love riding on the back of scooters. This was most people’s main mode of transportation so I often found myself on the back of someone’s scooter. Nothing like having the wind blow through your hair as you are zipping through Phuket. Of course there were this one day that me and 3 other guys decided to rent a car and go and visit the Big Buddah of Phuket. The Big Buddah is exactly what it sounds like, a huge Buddah on top of a mountain. The buddha is impressive and you can be blessed by a monk in the temple which was a very cool experience for me. But that is not why I am mentioning the jaunt to the temple. In true Jackie style, of course the day did not go smoothly! Being broke Muay Thai trainees we decided to rent the super cheap jeep down the road from the gym. Little did we know that this was going to be the equivilant of a Flinstone car. Actually, I think I may be insulting the Flinstone car by saying that. It was a fight to get the car to shift out of first gear. We started with Paul driving the car. Let me give you an explanation of exactly what Paul looks like so we can put this into perspective. Paul is an ex-professional mixed martial arts fighter, unbelievably huge with muscles coming out of everywhere and inked pretty much everywhere you can see. He is one intimidating looking dude who could probably rip the head off a cow with one hand. Now that I explained what Paul looks like I will say that Paul fought the jeep and the jeep won! It was like a Muay Thai work out on crack to get the car to  shift. I think Paul used every muscle in his body to get into 2nd. We should have realized at that point that this was a bad idea but no, we decided to forge on and make the best of it. Paul finally gets us onto the main road and we start cruising until we hit 55mph when we start shaking, violently. I thought the car was going to fall apart. Ok, no going over 55mph I guess. We now realize that this trip to the big buddah is going to be a long journey. So we settle in, cruising speed around 50mph (freakin mopeds are passing us for gods sake!) and we start to head up the windy roads to take us to the Big Buddah when we realize that we have no gas! Yes, people this is a comedy of errors! But we averted that disaster after a tense 15 minutes of hunting for a gas station. Whew! Finally we start to head up the very steep road to the temple and…. come on people, guess what happens next….whoever gets it right gets a free toaster…of course we stall on the middle of the mountain and then we can’t get the car started!  Can this trip get any better? Tons of Thai people stopped to help us and when they were getting ready to set up the jumper cables the car decides to make us look like complete jackasses and start up on the first turn of the key. I swear this car is the devil’s spawn and truly hates us. Eventually we make it up to the temple. I felt like making an offering at the temple as thanks for getting us there alive! Now going home was also an adventure cause the car decided to stall every time we shifted from 1st to 2nd. This made it really interesting when we had to cross the stupidly busy road filled with crazy Thai drivers. Turning across oncoming traffic in Thailand is a scary prospect. Turing across oncoming traffic with a car that stalls 7 times while trying to cross is just suicide. I just closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable crash. Thankfully we made it across but I think everyone in the car found god again for the 5 minutes it took to cross the road. We made it home ok but any thoughts of driving around Phuket were ruined and we just called it a day and decided to go back to our trusty scooters! LOL All, I can say is that it is never dull in my neck of the woods!

I also got to see a bunch of fights. Alot of the people training at the gym were fighting and I have to say we had alot of kick ass fighters. Suprisingly enough alot of the fighters were women and they seriously kicked some major butt. I could sit here and write a book about how amazing my experience was in Rawai but I will leave it off here cause I don’t want to bore you!

After my month in Phuket I headed off to do my GAP tour through Cambodia and Laos. I really enjoyed the tour. I met some really great people that helped to make the tour a great experience. There of course was a little bit of high school drama but I guess that is to be expected when you travel with a group larger than 3 people.

So I will start with Cambodia. In my opinion we did not spend nearly enough time in Cambodia. What a magical place. It seriously struck a chord with me and Cambodia will hold a special place in my heart. I can’t really figure out why I loved it so much. I think it is the fact that the Khemer people have been dealt such a shitty hand thoughout the years and yet they still have this prevading sense of hope and pride. I am not sure how many of you know about the Khemer Rouge and Pol Pot. I did not know anything about what occured in Cambodia in the 70’s but man did I get an education. Basically Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge took power from the existing government and instituted his version of chinese communism. It was brutual and relentless. All of the educated people and their families were killed, all of the cities were evacuated and the people were forced to work the fields. All money was abolished and many people died of starvation. Basically millions and millions of people were either executed or died of starvation or disease. It wiped out almost all of the adult population and  almost all of the educated populous. When the Pol Pot regime was defeated by the Vietnamese, Cambodia was left with a population of mostly uneducated people and a war torn country. One of the places we visited in Cambodia was one of the prisions where they carted people for questioning, torture and execution and then the Killing Fields. The Killing Fields os comprised of over 100 mass graves where thousands upon thousands of people were buried. Many of these graves were shallow. As you walk through the killing fields you can still see bits of bones and clothing in the ground. It is unbelievable. Our tour guide through the prison and Killing Fields was an actual survivor of the Khmer Rouge and his story of survivial was amazing. It was probably the most emotional day I have experienced on my whole trip. It is just unbelievable that so many people died over such a short period of time and it happened in the last 30 years! That is just crazy to me! Even now, Cambodia has a corrupt government and the people are pretty much in a shitty situation. Through it all though the people have such hope and this amazing outlook on life. It would be so easy to be bitter but they aren’t. They just keep smiling through it all and almost of the Cambodian people I met were wonderful, happy people. It was such a great place. The day that we went to the Killing Fields we also went to dinner at a resturant that was run by an orphanage. That was the highlight of my trip. After dinner we got to meet a bunch of the kids from the orphange. All of these kids were hand picked by the charity to come and live there and they were sent to school. They ranged in ages from 2 years old to 18 years old. All of them either lost both parents or 1 parent was dead and the other parent was not able to support their kids so they were brought to the orphange. These kids were just phenominal. I wish I had more time to spend with them. It was such a great way to end a really emotionally hard day. If anyone is interested, I have the website for the charity so you can check it out. They obviously can always use donations and I can tell you that it would be a great way to give back. The kids are totally amazing and deserving of any help they can get. Ok, enough preaching! All in all Cambodia was amazing. I obviously went to Siem Reap as well. We watched the sunrise there and we visited 4 different temples. Just unbelievable. The Jungle temple was my favorite. That is where they filmed parts of Tomb Raider. Very cool temple. I also did a cooking class which was very cool. Learned how to make  some tradtional Cambodian dishes and I got a cook book at the end so I can try to replicate them at home. Watch out people, I have a Cambodian cookbook and I plan to use you all as guinea pigs! LOL Hmmm…..what else, oh yeah I also got to try my first snake in Cambodia. That was interesting. Didn’t taste much like anything but if I had to give it a flavor I would say kind of like hard boiled eggs.

Now onto Laos. Laos was really, really laid back! I enjoyed Laos and again the people were very nice. We arrived in Laos and went to this island Dong Den. We stayed there for 2 days which was a nice little break. On the second day there my friend Caroline and I decided to rent bicycles and ride around the whole island. Four hours later we made it back to our hotel. It was a very fun journey and the kids we met on the way were so cute. They would run out of their houses to say hi and they loved to pose for pictures. It was so much fun except for the  aftermath. Let’s just say my body was angry with me….very angry with me. Well really it was more my ass that was angry with me. If it could have staged a revolt and physically removed itself from my body and walked away in protest I am sure it would have. It took a couple of days for my body to make nice, nice with me again. But besdies that it was great! We also got to go swimming in the Mekong. Actually all the girls decided to go on in our clothes. Kind of spur of the moment and lots of fun. A bunch of us tried to have a race against the current and it was kind of comical. We got maybe 10 feet before we were exhausted. The current was damn strong!

After Laos it was back to Bangkok and then onto Egypt! I am actually in Egypt at the moment on the nightbus to Cairo. I cannot say enough great things about Egypt so far. The people have been so friendly. I wasn’t expecting them to be so friendly and helpful. I have been pleasantly surprised! The other bonus is that Egyptian men like their women with junk in the trunk. I have been getting alot of “attentiton” since I have gotten here. No one has been innappropriate thank god but it has been nice hearing that I am beautiful on a daily basis! LOL Now only if the men back home could be so forthcoming with the compliments! The other really funny thing is that I have been asked if I was every nationalty but American. The most popular ones I have gotten has been Italian, Egyptian (I don’t get that one at all), English and Spanish. I mean they even hear me talk and still think I am anything but American. I guess my NY accent is pretty lame. I am doing a bad job of representin! LOL I have done a bunch of diving thus far and the Red Sea is amazing! There is so much life here and even snorkeling is out of this world! I am really excited to be in Egypt cause I have gotten to see Johanna, my friend that I met all the way in the beginning of my travels in New Zealand and who I also met up with again in Fiji. We just spent the last week together doing some diving and touring around Cairo. She left this morning. 🙁 But I get to hang out with Nathalie and Robert (my two kick ass friends that I spent 2-1/2 months with in Fiji- Robert was my dive instructor) for the next week or so! I can’t wait to get to spend time with them.

So the agenda is looking like Egypt, Jordan, Isreal, Turkey and Italy and then HOME SWEET HOME! I have to say that the closer I get to coming home the more and more I miss being home. I am so excited to get my butt back home so I can see all of my friends and family. If my job doesn’t work out I may not being staying home for very long but it will be so nice to get home at least for a little bit! Well, I love you guys and I miss you. I will try to update again in a more timely fashion. BIG EGYPTIAN HUGS!