Thursday, November 28, 2024

Tea, Tham Luang Cave & the Blue Temple

November 21st, 2024

On the advice and help from Patty, the owner of the homestay, we were able to get a driver for the day to take us to four different tourist destinations.  Lek picked us up in his car and we started to drive north of Chiang Rai.  His English wasn’t too bad, definitely better than our Thai and he had a bit of a sense of humour.

 

Our first stop was the Choui Fong Tea Plantation.  Naomi and I visited some tea plantations in India back around 2011, but this one certainly was a bit different, definitely fancier.  We stopped for a few photos here and there then went to the main building which had a cafeteria and a gift shop.  Unlike India, there was no museum or explanation of the tea growing, harvesting and preparation processes.  We had a refreshment with Naomi opting for some kind of a cold, fancy green tea drink and I had some green tea ice cream.  I have to admit that I was a bit taken aback by my first taste of the ice cream, but it got better and better…not that I’d go out of my way to buy and eat more.

Approaching the tea plantation:


Tea!




The view from the restaurant.


Enjoying our refreshments...I had green tea ice cream.  The first bite was odd...but it got better and better.

Do you like my hat?!?

How about this one?

Next on the list, was Tham Luang Cave.  You may not recognize the name, but this is the cave where 12 young soccer players and their 25-year-old assistant coach were trapped for 18 days in 2018 due to rising waters from rainfall that occurred while they were spelunking.  The story captured the attention of the world and experts from all over offered their help. 

 

Even though Patty had tried to persuade us that it wasn’t worth visiting the cave as you could only walk a few hundred meters into it.  Naomi and I had recently watched the Netflix movie about the incident and decided that we may regret it if we didn’t visit it seeing as we were only an hour away.


The mountains got bigger as we got closer to the cave.

Lek dropped us off at the parking lot where we got into a truck taxi which took us about a kilometre before we had to get in another truck taxi to go another 500 meters into the national park.  It didn’t really make sense to us why we had to switch vehicles, but when travelling, it’s not always wise to look for logic.

 

On the shuttle truck:


Entering the national park.

Exiting the back of the truck, the driver pointed this way and that way while speaking in Thai.  We didn’t know what he was trying to convey.  There were half a dozen buildings, most of which seemed to be empty.  Looking around, we had no idea where the cave was.  There were signs for lots of other things like the toilets and gift shop, but nothing pointing to the entrance of the cave.


A statue with a rescue worker with a bunch of pigs at his feet.  It took us a while to figure out, but the soccer team was called the "Wild Boars".

Love these massive leaves.

Getting close to the entrance of the cave.

We ended up following some people walking in one direction and lucked out and found the entrance.  There were a couple of bicycles leaning up against a railing.  All of the boys had biked to the cave after a soccer practice on that fateful day, and this was one of the clues that a park ranger found to realize that there were people in the cave.  Some other items from the team members such as football jerseys and flip flops were on display along with things used in the rescue missing, like radios, pipes, water pumps and the most chilling one to me: the rescue stretcher/sledge that was used to pull each of the boys out one by one.


A couple of the kids bikes...this was how a rager knew that some people were stuck in the cave.

Items from the team or involved in the rescue:

This is one of the "stretchers" used to carry the sedated boys out of the cave.  To me, this was the most interesting item on display.

If you’re not familiar with the story, the boys hiked into the cave and rain began to fall.  The waters rose and they became trapped inside.  The ranger not only found their bikes near the end of the day, but also some flip flops and backpacks in the cave.  He was unable to go further in due to rising water that had seeped in from the ground above.  A rescue mission was launched.


Cave divers explored deeper and deeper into the cave, but this required placing many oxygen tanks at staging spots so a diver could go further in.  They also set up ropes in order to find their way through the labyrinth faster.  Nine days after the boys first disappeared, two British divers finally found the boys on an elevated rock, almost 3 kilometres from the entrance.


Imagine for a moment what these boys were going through.  For these first nine days they had no food.  Dressed in only t-shirts and shorts, it would have been pretty chilly sleeping on the rocky floor.  They had flashlights but they would have had to use them sparingly so for the majority of the time, they would have been in pitch dark.  I recall being in a cave in Cappadocia in Turkey and turning off my flashlight for half a minute…it is incredible how dark it is in a cave.

 

The boys attempted to dig a way out, not only in hopes of escaping, but it also gave them a purpose.  In an interview of one of the boys in the movie, he mentioned how the boys inevitably got to talking about food that they would love to eat, being with their family and of course girls.  One boy asked this guy what he would say to a naked girl if she appeared in the cave…  “Well, I would tell her to freakin’ dig!”

 

During this time, water pumps had been furiously sucking out water from the cave, with over a billion litres of water pumped out of the cave.  However, with more rain falling, this effort was in vain.

 

It was determined that the boys could not stay in the cave for much longer as the rainy season was approaching (or had just arrived), plus oxygen levels in their chamber would soon be too low for survival.  Many ideas were floated as to how best extract the boys and it was decided that they be brought out under sedation.  Some of the kids could not even swim and it would have been a harrowing experience to scuba dive all that way if you’ve never done it before, plus you’re in a dark cave.  The boys were put into a “sked” rescue stretcher with a positive pressure full-face mask.  It took between 4-5 hours to remove each boy but amazingly they did it successfully.

 

Unfortunately, the whole rescue procedure was not without its costs.  A Thai Navy SEAL died while on his return from delivering three oxygen tanks to a chamber and another SEAL died the following year from a blood infection he contracted during the rescue operation.


Naomi and I descended some concrete stairs into the cavernous first section from the entrance but at this time, we were only permitted to go about 100 meters in.


Starting to walk down into the cave.

The entrance is quite cavernous.



Looking back at the entrance.






On our way out, the only path in or out, we say this sign... "Oh no, we're stuck!"  Send a rescue team!

Returning from the cave to where we had been dropped off, we found a little building with a fake cave opening that led to a small diorama detailing the rescue operation.  It was pretty cheesy and some of the lights and displays were turned off.  The displays were written in Thai without any English translation, but it was still worth the 10-minute walk through.  Thankfully Google Translate can work miracles too.


This pic was for Naomi's mom.

At the entrance of a small museum that details a bit of the rescue.

They had some funny little figurines to recreate the ordeal.

This is a screen capture from a GoPro video that one of the two divers who found the boys on Day 9...about 2.9 kilometres from the entrance of the cave.

The diorama of the found boys.

There was a young boy pulling this around, and he was super happy with his toy.  Naomi remarked how spoilt Western kids are.

Even though we couldn’t go far into the cave, we were both glad that we made the effort to visit it.  The entrance area of the cave was impressive, but it was more moving to think about what had happened there back in 2018.


On Patty’s recommendation, Lek took us to a small village partway up a small mountain where we had a drink in a restaurant with a nice view.  Interestingly, we were only a few kilometres away from the Myanmar border…at least I thought it was interesting.


Naomi enjoying her iced Americano.

Some local head dress that was on display in the coffee shop.

Cheers!

Pondering life...and it's good!



Returning to Chiang Rai, Lek dropped us off at the Blue Temple, properly known as Wat Rong Suea Ten.  It was completed in 2016 and like the White Temple that we had visited the previous day, it was a bit unorthodox from most temples in Thailand.  We wandered around for 15-20 minutes but both of us were exhausted from the day and the late afternoon sun was beating down hard.  We both agreed that the White Temple was more impressive and interesting.


At the Blue Temple with our driver Lek, before letting him go for the day.

Almost like an Avatar God.


Ommm....


Very ornate decorations.



Look into my crystal ball...

Weird baby statues near the temple.

This was the fanciest bus I've ever seen...super tall and plush.

Posing with our host Patty.

That evening we went back into town from our homestay to wander around a night market where Naomi bought a few things for herself and gifts for family and friends before having dinner in a big open food area.  There were many dining options, although a lot of them looked foreign and unappetizing to me.  We finally settled on Pad See Ew, which is similar to the famous Pad Thai but has wider noodles.  I have to admit that it wasn’t that good…but it filled a hole.


The food market in town.

Naomi captured this cute girl.

Uh...okay.

I understand the first two...but not sure about the third.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

Tomorrow we are flying to Hanoi…  Kop Kuhn Khap Thailand!  (Thank you)

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