Trans-Siberian Seagulls

There’s something comforting about keeping consistency in your lodging while traveling to a place multiple times. This trip marked our third stay at Centre Point Sukhumvit 10. We love this hotel for a lot of reasons, but mostly it’s just a great family friendly property that fulfills all of our needs as we acclimate to the new time zone and climate. Last year I wrote quite a bit about the breakfast buffet there (now dubbed as my favorite breakfast spot in the world), and this year it did not disappoint.

The amount of time our group DIDN’T sleep on the flights became apparent on our first day in Bangkok. We arrived at the hotel around 2:00am, and didn’t get nestled in for sleeping until about 3:00. In my head I figured we’d wake up around maybe 9:00 or so and just be tired for the day. But what ended up happening is that I woke up at 11:00am then hung out alone as the rest of my family slept until 2:30pm! I didn’t mind a bit though, as it gave me time to enjoy the city view from our room, grab a few groceries, and watch a bit of TV before they got moving around 3:00/3:30.

A thing I love about the ELCA: our international camp staff program. This past summer, we got the privilege of hosting one of the international staff who served at Crossways’ Imago Dei Village. To my knowledge, this was the first person Crossways has hosted from Thailand, and because of our connections here, we were invited to host her at our home both at the beginning and end of her summer. Alpha had an almost immediate connection with Miriam, and she worked her way into our hearts over the days we got to spend with her. We loved getting to learn from her, and we enjoyed getting to chat with her family over WhatsApp as well. In the time leading up to this trip, Adam had been exchanging messages with Alpha to arrange a meet-up.

So…after we finally got moving on Wednesday afternoon, we went on a quest to meet up with Alpha. She was gracious enough to come meet us at our train stop and to accompany us to the location of her internship, where her parents met us with their vehicle to take us out to dinner. Truth be told, I was jet lagged and not paying attention at all to where we were headed, so I was in for a real surprise when we were in the car for nearly an hour and ended up on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand at a little seaside town called Bang Pu.

 

Bang Pu is also known as Bang Pu Recreation Center, and is home to a mangrove forest and the choice migration location for seagulls from Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet, and China. This is a place we would have never known to visit based on tourist blogs, thus I am SO GRATEFUL to Alpha and her family for bringing us here! What a neat gem! I wasn’t sure if I should be exhilarated or terrified of my family feeding seagulls by hand, but it made for some good photos!

So a mangrove forest was a new-to-me ecosystem, and let me tell you it was a DELIGHT. I recognize now nerdy that sounds, but honestly I love getting the opportunity to explore a new ecosystem and to get just a glimpse of some of the creatures that live there. Was I terrified of running into a snake at some point in this? Yes. Absolutely. Was I checking EVERY tree branch we walked under to make sure there wasn’t a serpent wrapped around it? Yes…indeed I was.

But snake-related anxiety aside, it was great fun to see the crabs and mudskippers on our short walk. The crabs were tiny and really just small crabs at first glance, but when you look closer it was clear that they all had one proportionally sized claw and one GIANT claw that some of them used to fight. Crab Fight Club was not a thing I knew I needed in my life, but it was SUPER entertaining. On top of that the mudskippers were quite fun to watch — they were basically like tiny Jabba the Hutts crawling and flopping all over the surface of the mud. I really could have watched these things for much longer, but we had dinner to get to.

From the recreation center, we took a short drive to our next destination which was a cute little seaside place with restaurants and a couple small shops. Miriam was tickled because we let her ride in the back of the truck this time. The place we went was probably one of the most gorgeous places we could have had dinner that night. Alpha shared with us that they had opted to bring us there for dinner so that we could get some seafood and other foods that we likely wouldn’t find in other restaurants in the city…and they were right on. We got to try a variety of foods that we hadn’t gotten to have on previous trips, and we got to have some of the best papaya salad I’ve gotten to have to date. Overall the food was wonderful, the sunset was lovely, and the company was the best of all!

After dinner, we began the trek home. It was a lengthy drive again that was broken up by a stop at the seminary where Alpha’s parents met. The Church of Christ in Thailand is the ELCA’s global partner in Thailand, so it was fun just to stop and see this place of sacred formation for leaders of the CCT.

After this stop we got in the truck one last time to be dropped off at the BTS (sky train) station, which we rode back to our stop and headed to the hotel for the night. We thanked Alpha’s parents (Noina and Ae) for such a wonderful night, and they thanked us for taking care of their Alpha while she was with us this summer. In many ways, it felt like a moment of mutual gratitude for one another, as Alpha did so much for our family when she shared her presence with us last summer.