Sleeping in Huts with Giant Spiders and Other Creepy Crawlies

After almost two weeks in Chiang Mai, Brian and I headed up north to the mountains for a 4-day vegetarian cooking course at PunPun Organic Farm. We saw on the fancy website that we would be sleeping in mud huts, but boy was it a surprise to find that our mud hut (see pic) was a 10-minute walk up the mountain from the farm, had no real windows or doors, no electricity, a twin bed for us to share, a smelly mosquito net with a ton of holes, a squat toilet in the woods with no toilet paper, and an outdoor cold shower. If it hadn't been so cumbersome to get to the place, I think we would have left as soon as we arrived! Oh, and did I mention the 4-inch spider living in the bed?? Gah! The first night we hiked back up to the hut after dinner in the dark with only our headlamps to find that a bird had taken residence in our room; I shrieked and left the hut, while Brian found a random broom to shoo it out with... only it flew directly toward my headlamp, whacking me straight in the forehead! I swore that I was going to leave once the sun came up again.

In the end, we ended up sticking it out for the 4 days, and actually met some pretty cool people. There were two other women in our cooking class, and 20 interns staying at the farm building a new mud kitchen, mostly couples our age also on round-the-world trips. Their huts had electricity and actual windows and doors, though, hehe. We got a guided tour of the farm and gardens, did a couple hikes, learned to make 11 different dishes, and also made our own soymilk and tofu from scratch. And we saw some beautiful sunsets due to all the haze from the burning fields in the area! (see pic)

Roselle fruit	Wing bean
Banana flower	Banana flower salad we made
Cooking class

Making soymilk and tofu:

Step 1: Grinding soybeans	Step 2: Squeezing out the liquid
Step 3: Boiling the soy milk liquid	Step 4: Adding curdling agent
Step 5: Press the curds to make tofu

We returned to Chiang Mai for one more day after the cooking course to do laundry and take a warm shower, and then flew out the next day for a one-week stay at the southern Thailand beaches in Phuket. For our first two nights, we stayed in a $15 rudimentary bamboo beach hut (see pic) on the isolated Mai Khao beach on the northwest side of the island.







It had a great view (see pic) and we really enjoyed the quiet beach, but unfortunately the hut had another resident giant spider (see pic), my foot got attacked by sandflies (see pic), a crab pinched my big toe in the ocean, and the lack of A/C turned out to be little more cumbersome at the beach than in the mountains. We did get to see a herd of buffalo come wandering by on one of our beach walks, which was pretty cool, though! (see pic)

Giant Spider	Sand fly attack
Buffalo on the beach