Tuesday, January 24, 2017

News Years 2017 – Day 19


Today is Thailand.  Are we ever blessed to have now been in two cities in Thailand.  This city, Plunket was the major city that was hard hit by a Tsunami a number of years ago where hundreds of people were killed.  They have rebuilt the city and it is a major tourist destination.

There is no large pier at Plunket so we had to tender in to the city.  The ship arrived in the port at 10:00am and started the tender service shortly after that.

When we arrived at the pier, our guide was not there but he arrived shortly after that.  We were supposed to have an English speaking guide for a 6 hour tour of the major sights of the city.  The only problem was that our guide really didn’t know how to speak English and we didn’t realize it until after we were moving in the car and started to ask questions.

So, basically for a very cheap price, we went to some interesting and fun destinations and he took us to where we wanted to go, but we never heard anything about the country or what we were seeing along the way.

He gave us a book of pictures of the major sights in the city and he asked where we wanted to go and that is how we communicated. 

Our first stop was a tiger location where you had the choice of going into a cage with a large, medium or small tiger.  We choose the large tiger.  Yes, we really went into the cage.  There were 4 tigers in this very large enclosure and we were with a guide from the facility.  We could hold the tail, and touch anyplace on the tiger up to the shoulders.  It was an amazing ten minutes that we had.  They were not chained, just sitting there freely.  We also will post a great video with the tigers later.

Our driver then took us to the original town which had a lot of neat shops and then we traveled a little ways to a cashew factory.  This was amazing to see.  Each cashew is taken one at a time and placed on a machine that pushes down on the shell and breaks it.  They hand-pick out the cashew and then it goes to another person who uses a tiny knife to scrape away the skin.  No wonder they are so expensive as they are very labor intensive to produce.   

Next on our tour was to go to a bee factory and we were introduced to all kinds of honey, including Royal Jelly that goes on your face for a better complexion.  They said that this was very expensive in the US.  We didn’t buy any.

We next went to an elephant village where they were riding elephants, but not like we did a couple of months ago.  This was set up to give a lot of tourists a very quick ride.  They also rode on a seat with a guide driving the elephant on a short walk – it didn’t look like fun.

We however, paid $2 to feed an elephant and was that ever a lot of fun.  The elephant even wrapped his trunk around each of our necks and gave us a kiss on the cheek.  It was just fun and we will download a video when we arrive in Singapore.

After that we went to the largest temple in the city and it was huge and in addition, they were having a festival there and had dozens of booth selling everything, including a lot of local foods.

We had a noodle & shrimp dish, a strange desert and Ed ate a serving of beetles, grasshoppers and slugs as well as a couple of other types of bugs.  They were good!!

Then it was back to the port to take the tender back to the ship.

We met Brian and Sandy for dinner and talked about each of our adventures and had a good meal.

Then we went to the show at 10:30pm and onto the casino where both Ed and Barb lost just a little.

Tonight we set the clocks forward another hour and tomorrow is our last day of the cruise and it is a sea day.

Night for this blog.
Barb with a tiger.  They were not chained

Ed with a tiger

Barb getting kissed

Cracking the shell in the cashew factory

Thailand Pork on a stick (we think)

Eggs, noodles, bamboo shoots and ? made a great lunch

Lunch

7 types of bugs for desert!!

Yes Ed ate them!!

No comments:

Blog Archive

Contributors