LaSER trip to Thailand - 2008

Thailand 2008

After 9 months of preparation 19 of us left Heathrow for a trip of a lifetime.

We packed so much into three weeks that the time flew by and managed to seem like a long time as well.  We experienced the different cultures, history and traditions by visiting temples, palaces, ruins and shows, made lots of new friends and tried lots of new things, like riding an elephant!  We also discovered what it's like to be a celebrity.  People kept asking to have their photo taken with us!

There were so many highlights it's difficult to decide where to start and impossible to choose which was the best, although stroking a real live tiger has to be very high on the list.  It is difficult to list everything we did but this should give you an idea of the variety and fun we packed into those three short weeks.

We interviewed a Buddhist monk (he would like to visit Liverpool), played parachute games with school children (who could have kept playing a lot longer than us) and met Guides everywhere we went.  The people we met were kind, friendly and generous.  We learnt a traditional Thai song and kept singing it wherever we went (it often got us spontaneous applause) and several words of Thai that we used whenever we could - often to the quiet amusement of the person we were speaking to!

We travelled down rivers on a barge, canoe and raft, across the country on a night train and an aeroplane, across towns on a sky train, underground train, taxi, tuk tuk, tram, truck and van.  We also rode on elephants, buffaloes, ox carts and go-carts.  We stayed in cities, towns, a hill tribe village and holiday resorts.  We ate rice at every meal and drank gallons of water (Catt, our First Aider, was adamant we weren't going to dehydrate and carried Dioralyte in her camel pack!) and everywhere we went included shopping!

We had a go at planting rice, making pots, traditional Thai desserts and batik, crossbow shooting and firing a catapult.  We had a Thai massage, swam in rivers, pools and the Andaman Sea, walked through rain forests and had our own ‘Mountain Top Experience' when we renewed our promise at the highest point in Thailand but the biggest impact has to have been made by the wonderful children we met at the five different schools we went to.  We were treated like royalty and even ended up on local TV when we went to help at a school for ‘abandoned' children because they had built two climbing frames with the money we had sent them.  The children were mostly from very poor families who couldn't afford to keep them or were orphans and we spent several hours with them, playing games, singing and doing crafts.  They were keen to learn, polite and great fun.  We came away determined to raise more funds to help the school get better facilities for these children.

So although the adventure is over the challenge isn't.  We've created a Challenge badge to get everyone in the country involved in raising funds for a new toilet block for the school (they have one for 98 children!) which has been featured in the December Guiding magazine and on the Girlguiding UK website.  More information is available by emailing thailandchallenge@yahoo.co.uk or going to Thailand Challenge

So please join in the fun and actually make a real difference in the world.

Sharon Davis