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So Thailand is still pretty awesome in case anyone was wondering. Enjoying delicious fruit and beautiful scenery every day hasn't gotten old yet.

This is a snake I found hiking the other day. I'm not sure if he's poisonous or anything, but he didn't seem particularly interested in biting me, so I guess I'm not too worried about it.








A few steps later I saw this crab. Apparently in Thailand, crabs live in creeks and waterfalls in the mountains. I personally had never heard of such a thing.









This is a rubber tree, and the white stuff is latex flowing out of it. I learned how this all worked the other day, as its the main source of income in the community I live in. The rubber hangs out just before the cambium layer, so two out of every 3 days you cut down another half inch or so
releasing the rubber. There are rows of these trees everywhere, looks kind of like a darker aspen forest. I'll have to take a picture of that sometime and put it up here.


Sunday I went on a bicycle ride, and got what seemed to be a completely unprovoked flat tire. I patched it, started pumping it back up, discovered a new hole. After going through this sequence until I had 5 or 6 patches in the tube, I realized my rim tape was jacked up, probably from getting 8 flat tires in Chainat during peace corps training. Chanthaburi has much less thorn action going on for which I am eternally greatful.

Anyway, yesterday Balat Tanin, the government officer I'm currently staying with, drove me down to the neighboring community to see if they could fix it. Apparently cheap bikes don't use rim tape? which I did not realize, so we headed down to the next town, which still had nothing, and then decided to go into the city to it fixed. There we found a legitimate bike shop, that fixed me up for 75 baht, about 2 dollars. Another Peace Corps volunteer Shawna (green shirt and jeans in the center of the picture) lives near the city of Chanthaburi, I called her up to see if she wanted to get lunch before we left. But, instead of going to work after lunch, Balat Tanin decided to take us to first, a dolphin show (left my camera in the car), and then a waterfall Namtok Pliu. It was pretty hilarious when Shawna's mom called her, and she replied over the loud music "Sorry I can't talk, I'm at a dolphin show." No, Peace Corps was not what we expected. Namtok Pliu is pretty beautiful despite the absurd amount of people. Definitely the most amount of other farangs (foreigners) I have seen since Bangkok.