Chiang Mai

I've been in Chiang Mai for almost 3 days now. Our 10 hour bus trip was long, but uneventful. We arrived here at 130am and got a tuk tuk (scooter cab) to the hostel. I wasn't sure of we were going to make it. The three of us and our bags was a tiiiiggghhhttt squeeze! The first day we explored the city. We all love it here. A lot smaller than Bangkok, but still a good energy. There's a fun night bazaar where you can find anything in the world. New Nike shoes, purses, clothes, food, backpacks, toys... We also booked tours- Dan went catfish fishing, Matt went to the highest point in Thailand and I went to the Golden Triangle (where Laos, Thailand and Myanmar meet at the Mekong river) and then we visited the Karen long neck tribe which is near the Myanmar border. They're refugees from the old Burma. It was crazy to see their neck rings. I got to feel them and they are HEAVY! The rings don't actually make their necks longer it pushes their shoulders down which makes more sense. If they take off their rings their neck will go back to size in 5 years! Today we're going to relax around here and then take the night bus to Chiang Khong which is where the slow boat to Laos starts (the Laos border). The boat stops for the night in Pakbeng and ends in Luang Prabang. I'm looking forward to Laos, a lot of my friends who have been to Southeast Asia says it was their high light! <3

The hangover 2

Yesterday we did a lot of walking!! We took the sky train and ferry down the river again and then walked to khao san road which is a popular place for tourists. It was also where some scenes from The Hangover 2 movie were filmed. they like telling people that. The walk there was my favourite part, all the streets are covered in people selling things. It's the nice kind of selling though, people aren't bombarding you to buy they're just happy for you to look. I bought a really cool pair of handmade sandals. We had lunch at an amazing food stall by the river. It cost $1 for a huge plate of pad Thai. I am loving the food here. At night we went to the Sky Bar which was another scene from the Hangover 2 movie. It was amAzing. It's the highest building in Bangkok, 64 floors and you can see everything. Bangkok is an expansive city, it looks like it never ends. We were up there for sunset, although it was smoggy so it wasn't that great. I thought it looked the best once the sun was down. We found another little food stall for dinner. I had rice vegetables and prawns. I don't even know how far we walked but I was early to bed last night. Today were headed to Chiang Mai, hopefully on a bus. We have to go to the bus station and book our tickets. Its 10 hours which I imagine in thai world is more like 12 or 13. Its air conditioned and the seats recline a bit. I'm hoping to get some decent sleep. Originally we were going to take the train but it's full- something that I didn't think even happened! Will hopefully have Internet when we get to chiang mai (will hopefully get to chiang mai) so will update when I'm there. <3

Good Morning :)

It's my second morning in Bangkok, my other friend Dan arrived last night. Yesterday Matt and our new friend Rob from England explored the city. We took the Skytrain to Central Pier where we caught a boat down the river. Boat seems to be a very common mode of transportation. The river was SO busy, it was like rush hour. We were on the public transport boat, the biggest on the river which I was glad for. All the smaller boats seemed to be yielding to us which was probably in their best interest. The river was VERY polluted, I don't think anyone should be swimming in there. I can't imagine there are any fish in there either, and if there are I don't think anyone would be able to eat them. I'm pretty sure we saw a dead cow floating along the river (Matt checked it out with his binoculars haha). I have never traveled with someone who had binoculars before but I guess they come in handy for situations like that... if you really have to know if the floating thing in the river is a dead animal, or just a piece of wood. We started out at Wat Po, the highlight there was the Reclining Buddha. It was a huge (HUGE!) gold Buddha laying on it's side in a room. Also on the grounds were other temples and little statues of Buddha. After that we walked through a market to get to The Grand Palace. I often feel that once you've seen one palace/ temple, you've seen them all. They're very beautiful, detailed, ornate, sparkly, golden... but without knowing some history about the temple it could be anywhere. The Grand Palace was created in 1792- I like imagining how it was built back then, how long it must have taken. I also like to imagine what the palace was like when it was still in use. There are paintings all over the walls of these buildings that portray what it could have been like. A lot of Buddhists still come to these temples and statues of Buddhas to pray. We saw a lot of monks there saying prayers and bowing. You're not allowed to face your feet towards the Buddha so you have to sit on your knees, otherwise a Thai security guard comes over and blows his whistle at you... luckily that didn't happen to us. My general feeling of Thailand so far is a good one. Everyone I've interacted with so far seems genuinely interested in helping you. Unlike India where I felt like everyone just wanted to get money out of you. I haven't been bombarded with people trying to sell you things or take you in their cabs. We'll see if that holds up for the rest of my trip- it'd be awesome if it did because people in your face all the time gets exhausting. I think today is our last day in Bangkok, tomorrow we'll head out- either to Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) or Vientiane (Laos). We're going to explore some more today and make our plans for tomorrow. I don't want to jinx anything but I'm feeling good- I haven't been sick yet and I haven't been super jet lagged. <3

BANGKOK!

I've arrived in Bangkok! It's so nice and warm here. I traveled the whole way in flip flops getting weird looks from people in Detroit, but it's worth it now haha. My flights were pretty standard. Detroit to Tokyo was 13 hours- epic journey. I can never get comfortable enough in airplanes to sleep well. I dosed off a bit on each flight but never felt well rested. I've never minded airplane food, I always thought it was edible but not amazing. Delta airplane food though, it's bad. I ordered a special vegetarian meal before I left, which I did get but it was so weird. My dinner was some unidentified mush.. it was brown and salty, and it came with something green, maybe spinach. Instead of a brownie for desert like everyone else, I got honeydew melon... and no butter for my bun. And then breakfast I got couscous and mandarin oranges- the weirdest combination. It was so bland but I was hungry so I ate it. Lunch was a little more typical, rice and some stirfry veggies. I got some delish Udon noodles with tofu in Tokyo to make up for it though. I got through customs and got my bag without any trouble and I found the bag carousel where my friend's flight was and met him without any trouble too! It was cool to see someone I know halfway across the world. Our other friend gets here tonight. AND one of our other friends from fire, Caitlin, sent me a message last night- she's coming to Thailand at the end of the month!!! Amazing, she's going to come to the Full Moon Party with us in Koh Phangnan, and maybe continue on with us after. I'm just waiting for Matt to get up and then we'll go get some breakfast, and explore Bangkok. Maybe the Royal Palace, Kohsoan road, and the skytower? We met people last night who had just been to the Skytower, it's in the Hangover 2 movie and apparently the views are amazing. They suggested we go at night, so we'll see how we're feeling tonight. The hostel we're at right now is called WE Bangkok, it's great. Clean, friendly, free wifi, lots of people. We're here again tonight, and then from there not sure. So excited to be in Thailand! :D <3

I'm off again!

I leave Sunday morning for a 2 month trip to Southeast Asia. I am very excited!!! I keep telling people it feels a lot different than my trip to India because I was so nervous about traveling by myself that I never really got excited.. just anxious. I've got 2 travelling buddies this time, friends I met while fighting fire in Red Lake- Matt and Dan. Dan will be there for a month, Matt for a month and a half, so I'll have the last 2 weeks of my trip by myself. I figure by then I will feel settled in the culture and will enjoy some time to myself. We have loose plans; what we know for sure is that we're flying into Bangkok, going to Laos, Northern Thailand, then heading down to the Southern Thailand islands (koh Phangan and Ko Samui) for the full moon party. After that I think we're going to Malaysia, then maybe Cambodia or Indonesia. We're going to play it by ear, if we find somewhere we love we'll stay there a bit, if not we'll keep moving.

I've really been enjoying this snow, I got out to Holiday Valley last week. It's ALMOST enough to keep me here for a winter, but it's 35 degrees in Bangkok... and that sounds amazing. I'll be keeping my blog updated with my whereabouts and my adventures. Of course internet is sporadic so I'll do my best!

so many firsts!!

It's been a while since I've last written a blog, I don't think I've had a dull moment since. I haven't been to any more fires but I've been doing a lot of work cutting trails and helipads at Okanse Lake which is the location of a prescribed burn that Red Lake is doing sometime in September. It is a lot of work, the whole place is blow down and the part I was working on recently is shin deep water. It's great experience on the saw. One of the nights there I saw the Northern Lights for the first time ever. I don't think they were that spectacular but I thought they were AMAZING!!! They were green and really bright, I loved it. Then on my days off we drove to Steinbach in Manitoba and went SKYDIVING!!!! We flew to 11 000 feet, it was so crazy. I bought the video of me and it was hilarious. I had a minor freak out, I'm not sure what happened but I know that I was not in control of my limbs or my brain. It was so cool- as soon as I did it I wanted to do it again. I love adrenalin.

THEN, I went fishing yesterday and I caught a 35 inch northern (pike)! I couldn't believe it, I screamed so loud when it surfaced, I was not expecting it to be that big. It put up such a good fight, took me about 5 minutes to get it into the boat. Good thing I had people there, my friend helped me get it into the boat- he picked it up by the gills and brought him in. Northerns are slimy and uggggllly and scary!! It kind of scares me seeing such a big fish in a lake, makes me not want to swim in there anymore.

Now I'm back at work. All the crew members are gone so it's just crew bosses and crew leaders. It's really quiet around the bunks with everyone gone. I think there's 6 people left here, and then a bunch left who don't live at the bunks. There were 10 fires in the North West Region yesterday so I'm hoping to get on a fire before my contract is over. Hope everyone is enjoying the last few days of summer- the leaves are already turning and it definetly feels like fall up here. <3

Red 39

Red 39 Been back from Red 39 for a couple days. It was a human caused fire, there was a contractor crew doing logging and one of their machines started the fire. We weren’t the first crew on the fire, we were called in 2 days later to hit 3 spot fires off the main fire. The fire was originally small but it had a sudden wind shift and was now 65 hectares. We were just coming off 2 days off and I was in the shower at 9am when I heard someone knocking on the door- it was my crew leader saying we had to be at base right now because we were going to Red 39. Within the hour we were on the chopper heading to the fire. One of my favorite parts of the job is the unpredictability. The first 3 days of the fire were good- after we hit the spot fires spot fires we had to put in a line to stop the fire from jumping a creek into some standing trees. We were working around an area of new regen trees which burn really easily. One night at 10pm we saw trees torching (on fire from bottom to top) which is unusual so late at night. Unfortunately the 3rd night we got 60+ mm of rain which put an end to the fire behaviour pretttty quickly.

We were on the fire with 4 other Red Lake crews and we were all camped together which was fun. One night I was awoken at 630am to what sounded like something stepping on my tent, and then grunting. I somehow convinced myself it wasn’t a bear, and went back to sleep. I was telling my crew leader about it in the morning, and then the other Red Lake crews came over to see if our dining tent had been ripped apart by a bear as well. It hadn’t, but it proved that it had been a bear that trampled my tent. We all went on the line that day and the bear came back during the day and mauled all of our dining tents and garbage bags. The overhead of the fire thought it’d be a good idea to switch campsites to avoid anymore bear problems. Our new camp was wicked, right on a lake that we could swim/ wash in after work. Of course, the bear found us a few days later. I don’t know what he found so interesting about me but he showed up at my tent again one night at midnight. I woke up my crew leader who had the chainsaw in the fly of his tent and we started it up and chased him away. One of the other guys we were camping with had an air (bear) horn that he fired off a couple times and we didn’t see the bear for the rest of the time. My crew ended up being the last crew on the fire so we were there for 13 days. I got to do AGA scanning one morning which meant flying the whole fire looking through heat sensor binoculars looking for hot spots. They do it for bigger fires to make sure there aren’t any hidden smokes/ hot spots. My crew leader did the main part of it but I got to look as well- it was difficult to tell the difference between actual hotspots and rocks that had absorbed heat from the day. We went at 530am before the sun was up to minimize the possibility of the AGA showing daytime heat, but it was still hard to tell the difference. When we got back from the fire we went to Okanse again and cut a helipad for the prescribed burn that I was talking about last time. It was a lot of work but I always like getting experience on the saw. I just had 2 days off which was much needed after 19 days of work. When we were at Okanse we got A LOT of rain which has knocked down our hazard again. Looks like we’ll be slow for a while, but you never know when it’ll pick up again. I’ve added some pictures of our fire/ my crew.

My crew- me, AJ (crew member), and Jack (crew leader). They're amazing!

AJ and I built this bench- our first attempt.. worked out pretty well. Having a back rest in the bush is AMAZING!!
<3