Bizarre travel experiences!

Look out for our short series on our travel experiences, here is the first, the most bizarre:

  • Who’s going to get the chicken head? Really you eat chicken head?! Certainly one of the most bizarre meals I’ve ever been served up, nope don’t fancy that one much!
Anyone for chicken feet?!
  • Anyone for chicken feet?!
    Tasty huh, the helpx host we were staying with said they were like crisps to Chinese people, not sure that planet she was living on! Whilst she gobbled them down like they were the tastiest morsels on the planet, I cringed at the curled talon nails on the end of the feet. Gingerly I tasted them, sure the sauce she had cooked with them was tasty, but I just could not get past trying to pull off the muscle like tendons with my teeth! John on the other hand was a bit more adventurous, but we giggled to ourselves afterwards why on earth you would want to eat them!
  • Nail clippings and locks of hair for Loi Krathrong – Loi Krathong is celebrated annually in Thailand on the evening of the full moon of the twelfth month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar, where it’s traditional to decorate and float a basket on the river. Traditional krathong are made from a slice of the trunk of a banana tree or a spider lily plant, however modern krathongs can be made of bread, which can disintegrate and be eaten by fish.
    Our rose and orchid krathrong

    Our rose and orchid krathrong
    The krathong is decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, incense sticks, and a candle. The candle venerates the Buddha with light, while the krathong’s floating symbolises letting go of all one’s hatred, anger, and defilements. People sometime cut their fingernails or hair and place the clippings on the krathong as a symbol of letting go of past transgressions and negative thoughts. A small coin is sometimes included as an offering to the river spirits. Legend says if a couple releases their krathong together, they will meet and fall in love again in the next life.

    Sticking to tradition, earlier in the day I’d snipped some of John’s hair and my fingernails (gross huh! I figured they were better than toenails to carry around!) and put them in a tissue in my bag. We searched the stalls for a pretty krathrong and chose a medium sized one decorated with roses and orchids. We headed down to the river and added our nails, hair and a gold coin, lit the candle and the incense and John took it down to the river bank to float off. Not sure if that technically means we’ll be together in the next life, but I wasn’t tempting falling in!

    Thousands of krathrongs being floated in Chiang Mai

    Between the river full of the floating krathrongs and the sky awash with floating lanterns it was so pretty! I’m not sure I’ve got rid of all my anger, but a few months after I did manage to get a job that has benefitted us financially. As for together forever, well we’ve since got engaged six months after, but I’m happy to just live in the now than worry about the next life!!

  • Finding glass in your foot years later! – Gross, not technically travelling, but John managed to find a chunk of glass in his foot from when he’d stood on glass in the sea in Thailand years before. How he hadn’t noticed it before I’ll never know, pretty gross huh!
  • Living with a porn star wannabe in Sydney – My first introduction to the attention seeking bimbos of Sydney. Living in a share house this nightmare crawled in with her boyfriend at 3am in the morning, woke the house puking, singing (badly) at the top of the voice til 4 or 5am, listening to the same song on repeat (I’m still drove insane to hear it to this day!), screaming match with a boyfriend whilst she was falling over and sounded like an elephant and then proceed to let the whole street know she was having a shag. Really, how your boyfriend didn’t know you were faking your moaning and screaming for 20 minutes I do not know (or maybe it just made him feel like a superstar?!), someone put a sock in her gob! The noise, I’ve never heard anything like it and (please) hopefully won’t ever again!
  • Tubing in Laos – John’s adventure, pretty fun, alcohol combined with tubing down a river, health and safety, erm let’s not go there!
  • Picking a restaurant in Ashfield, Sydney – lamb spine, duck feet, curdled cold blood soup, me thinks I prefer Westernised Chinese food!