A group of them were fishing. So much fun to watch.
Category: Travel
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May Timeline
Google Maps is showing a much more interesting timeline for May than usual:
The US locations are the usual I-95 drive to Georgetown and my sister-in-law upstate:
Dubai was just a flight connection, but this was the fun part:
The Andaman Sea is really nice to swim in…
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Elephants
We were in Thailand for two weeks and we visited two different elephant sanctuaries. Elephants are native to Thailand and have been domesticated there for hundreds of years. Many of these elephants are treated poorly, especially as they get older. So these sanctuaries try to acquire these elephants to treat them humanely and they offer tours to cover expenses.
The two sanctuaries we visited were quite different. The first was outside of Chiang Mai. It was an hour drive into the country. For the tour, we put on a special outfit (we were told the elephants had been trained to expect food from people dressed in red) with boots and a bamboo hat. That would have been fine, but it was crazy hot. Important side note, it’s better to visit Thailand in December/January than in May, but we were there for a wedding, so we didn’t choose the date.
So we meet the elephants and feed them a ton of bananas:
Then the elephants need to go for a walk and eat more real food. So we walk with them while their handlers are chopping up banana trees for them to eat.
This is interesting to watch, but did I mention how hot it was? We are pretty much puddles of sweat at this point. My wife and daughter are ready to bail, but the elephants have their routine and we have to follow it. After they eat they walk to a pool to cool off and get muddy.
And then they walk to a separate pool where we go in with them to wash them off. As hot as we were, that was much appreciated.
The second elephant sanctuary was in Phuket. It had the same mission but a very different tour. In the first tour, we followed the elephant’s routine. This tour was geared towards the tourists. If it hadn’t been so damn hot I might have preferred the more natural approach of the first tour, but in the heat the second was much better. There were similarities, we started out feeding the elephants bananas (no silly outfit).
Then, just a short distance away, we gave them a mud bath.
Then, also a short distance away, we go in a small pool and splash them with water to get the mud off.
And finally, under a totally artificial shower structure, we brushed them clean. All of this happened in an area about the size of a baseball diamond, so it wasn’t exactly hard for the tourists. And Phuket was about ten degrees cooler than Chiang Mai, so hot, but not brutally so.
So while the first tour was much more natural, there’s something to be said for not collapsing of heat exhaustion. And the second tour was much quicker, getting us back to the beach…
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Sky Boss
We just got back from a two-week trip to Thailand including a friend’s wedding. I’ll have more Thailand posts soon, but the trip itself is fresh in my mind. My wife likes to travel, but hates to fly, so with such long flights we decided to splurge and go first class.
Going to Bangkok we took Emirates. Emirates first class is crazy expensive, but the experience is over the top, ridiculously amazing. At JFK airport, you start at the Emirates lounge with nice food and drinks, and you board the plane not from a gate, but directly from the lounge.
The first class seat isn’t a seat at all, it’s a “suite”. You have a door you can close. The screen for movies is huge, of course the seat flattens to a bed and the goodies are plentiful. Champagne greets you and they even bring you pajamas for the flight.
The food is delicious, and you can have it whenever you want. There is even a shower available at the end of the flight. You only get 5 minutes of water, but I had to try it. When we arrived in Dubai for our layover, an Emirates representative met us to drive us in a golf cart to the next gate (well, the next lounge). Then we repeat the process for the flight to Bangkok. I don’t know if we’ll ever do that again, but wow, it was a treat.
Within Thailand we flew two short flights. For these, regional airlines have frequent inexpensive flights, so we flew VietJet. No fancy first class here, but the flights were 1 and 2 hours, so no biggie. And for a few dollars more, VietJet offered something called SkyBoss. It looked like it got you to the front of the plane and included checked baggage. We had a lot of luggage, so we did it.
It turns out that SkyBoss has two other important perks that I wasn’t aware of. The first was a short (non-existent really) check-in line. That was nice. But the second perk was the best. If you have SkyBoss, your luggage comes out absolutely first. Seeing your four bags come out right away and leaving before everyone else was so nice.
When we got home to JFK yesterday, waiting for our bags to arrive on the carousel, we really missed SkyBoss.
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New Orleans Beauty
We just finished the annual Origami Risk Colleague Conference, where we bring the entire company together for a few days. This year it was in New Orleans. Everyone thinks about Bourbon Street first, but I got to do an afternoon biking/kayaking outing one afternoon in City Park.
The kayaking was delightful with wonderful sculptures along the way. A tower of cellos…
I’m not sure what to call this one…
Perhaps “delightful” isn’t the right word for this one, but amusing…
Biking through the park you pass a million wonderful oak trees…
And it was a great conference. It’s hard to believe this company was once only four people.
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Post Henri Skaket Beach
Not converted to black and white It wasn’t bad here, but not much of a beach day…
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Low Tide
I love low tide at Skaket Beach. It makes Google think I can walk on water…
This picture was taken on the way back, maybe 3/4 of the way out, as the tide was coming back in.
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Cliff Walk
We ended up with a childless Memorial Day weekend and even knowing that the weather would be lousy, decided to get out of town. We used to go to Newport, Rhode Island before we had kids, so that sounded like a good getaway. Not too far and fun to walk around even if it’s chilly.
The weather lived up to the forecast and was terrible. But we love to walk and decided to bundle up and go for it. There is a cool walk called the Cliff Walk along the water and near the mansions (Newport was the playground of the rich folks back in the day, Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts, etc.)
We had walked it before, but never the whole thing. It starts out nicely paved.
Parts of it are less so…
Some parts are genuinely tricky on a rainy day. I don’t have pictures of those parts as I was trying not to fall on my butt.
It’s quite long…
There’s way more than this There are many cool mansions.
One of the Vanderbilts apparently thought a Chinese Tea House would be nice. Go figure.
On a nicer day, it could be spectacular. On a bad day it was still pretty cool. We were pretty much soaked by the end of the walk, but fun nonetheless.
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