What's on the agenda for 2024...?

I noticed that our friends Linda and Steven over at The Chouters posted their upcoming plans for 2024, and yesterday was a quiet day for us so I thought we'd take this opportunity to do the same.

Our plans are always pretty flexible though, so don't take all of this as being written in stone! 

Temple tunnels, and met some other Canadian senior nomads

We had originally planned to go on a hike, but ended up going to a temple instead. Personally, I'm already "templed out". They begin to all look the same after a while, so unless there is something special, I've lost interest. However this one had some interesting tunnels built into the complex, so we made the 5.5 km trek through the city to get there.

So I suppose we did do a hike... but it certainly wasn't in nature!

Arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand

We called a Grab taxi (about $3.00) to take us and our bags to the Big Ubon Breakfasts for one last great breakfast before we flew out. It's only about 2 kms, and we would normally walk that, but Ubon is definitely not pedestrian friendly, especially during morning rush hour. 

We had a great breakfast, and the owner Andy offered to drive us the short distance to the Ubon airport terminal.

Daytrip number two to the Mekong River

We didn't see everything we wanted to see the day before, so once again we hopped in the rental car. This time, we drove northeast to Kaeng Sam Phan Bok, or as it is known in English, the 3,000 holes.

This is a section on the Mekong River where there are a lot of rapids during the high waters of the rainy season, and the swirling waters have created an odd landscape of erosion in the rocks. This phenomenon can only be seen during the December to March dry season when the low water levels enable you to explore the shoreline.

Busy day in a part of Thailand that not many tourists go

We are staying in the city of Ubon, which is a place not many tourists go. The city itself doesn't have a lot to offer, however it is day trip distance from the Mekong River and the border with Laos. 

And on that border at the river are quite a few interesting things to see!

We're going to be renting a car for a couple of days!

It was 8:30am before we finally made our way out of the room for breakfast. We've got a kettle and tea and coffee in the room so we were just relaxing. Anyhow, the little restaurant area is right outside our room, so we figured we'd go for breakfast because we'd seen breakfast items on the menu. We went out there, and there was nobody around, with a "closed" sign on the door. (Turns out they stopped serving breakfast during Covid, and never got it started again).

So, I found another place about 15 or 20 minutes walk away.

We're kind of bouncing around without a plan!

But that's fine, because it's all new to us anyhow. 

Yesterday, we took the train from Pak Chong to Ubon Ratchathani. Everyone just calls it "Ubon", so that's what I'll do from now on. Originally, we were thinking we would try to get into Cambodia from Pak Chong, but the route was too difficult.

Back into the national park

One of the problems with this type of "senior backpacking" travel that we are currently doing is that we don't have a vehicle. We've solved this problem in the past by renting a car, the way we have done in Romania and Turkiye. This time, we've been trying to avoid it because we really didn't need one in the cities, and the train is so easy to use. 

But when it comes to getting into a national park here in Thailand to do some hiking, it does make things a little more complicated.

Bugs and bats

On Friday afternoon, we did our scheduled half day tour with the group from the guesthouse. This tour does not go into the national park itself, so it's quite a bit cheaper because you don't have to pay the park entrance fee per person.

Once again, there were five of us in the back of the truck... us, a single guy from Birmingham, UK, and a couple from France.

We saw a lot of interesting stuff!

A busy day yesterday as we did a full day tour into Thailand's Khao Yai National Park. 

We had read that the full day tour can have as many as 15 people on it, but you are separated into groups of 5, so it feels like you're on a small group tour. We had a younger guy from Germany, and a mother and daughter from France with us.