In Thailand, a bpai tiao is a trip of any length. I’ve written about some of my more significant bpai tiaos to tourist destinations here, to be used as travel ideas and tips.
Tat Ton Waterfall was not the only bpai tiao that I was taken on after moving to my site. I was also taken on a day long trip the Khorat’s Amphur Muang (province’s main city and kind of like a state’s capital) by my co-teacher and we also brought along Gee, one of my host sisters.
At first, I wasn’t sure where we were going. I knew we were going to a museum and maybe somewhere where we would be biking. This is kind of the nature of bpai tiaos, you agree to go and you only vaguely understand where but it always ends up being fun.
Anyway, our first stop was the Khorat Fossil Museum. There are three main exhibits on three different topics. The first hall is all about petrified wood, with lots of examples of petrified wood, great explanations on how wood is petrified and what causes the different colors, and a great movie where the floor moves when the film mentions earthquakes. The exhibits are all posted in both Thai and English, which made the experience that much more enjoyable for me.
The second hall is about prehistoric elephants. Not in a wholly mammoth sense, because wholly mammoths are from North America, but in a sense that there were lots of different kinds of elephants that I did not even know had existed. There were elephants that had 4 tusks, elephants that had shovel-like tusks, elephants with tusks like wholly mammoths but not furry. I had not know that there were so many different species of elephants. Once again, there was a film and this one was kind of ridiculous and awesome: it was a fictional computer animated story about different families of prehistoric elephants. I don’t even know how else to describe it. But the exhibit hall had great displays.
After the prehistoric elephant hall was my favorite part, and the part that I had been looking forward to since we parked, the dinosaur hall. (Side note: dinosaur in Thai is di-no-sao.) First you walk through a tunnel that details the different dinosaur eras and epochs. In the tunnel is an animatronic T. Rex head that is motion activated and thoroughly terrified us when we first set it off. Once again, there is a lot of great information and a lot of attention paid to the dinosaurs that have been found in Thailand. This time there was an informational video and an animated fictional video. There was also a neat diorama and some great fossils, including a complete allosaurus skeleton.
Additionally there is a small room on the other side of the grounds that was about bears. It was supposed to be focused on panda bears, according the name, but it really took a quick look at lots of different kinds of bears.
Entrance was, once again, more expensive for foreigners than for Thai people (100THB and 50THB respectively).
After the visit to the museum, we decided to go to The Mall to escape the heat (my forecast said 102 degrees Fahrenheit). And yes, that is the name of the place: The Mall. And it is entirely accurate to call it that. This place is huge and you can conceivable get anything you want there. I was able to get Pizza Hut for lunch. We also went and saw a Thai movie that had English subtitles. It was a modern comedic retelling of a Thai movie that my co-teacher said has been made many times before. It was about a man who was at war and his wife who gave birth while he was away. He comes home with his four buddies. However the village is acting weird about her and him and his friends begin to suspect that she is ghost. They eventually figure out that she is and try to make her go away, especially since the main character is terrified of ghosts. But in the end, he decides that he loves her too much even though she is a ghost to make her leave forever. There is a lot of Thai humor that the sold out show was in stitches about. I thought some of it was pretty funny, but not nearly as funny as the rest of the theater did. It was pretty cool to see a Thai movie, though.
