Tiger Temple Side Trip

Tiger Temple. 1237 steps. It doesn’t sound like a lot unless you’ve been dancing til the wee hours of the morning just 120 minutes prior for a Glaswegian volunteer’s birthday party. After arriving at the temple at 6 a.m (I know right), me and about 10 other GVI’ers began the ascent and set about destroying our calf muscles. After taking breaks every 20 steps for the hour long climb, we finally reached the top and were given a warm welcome by a family of monkeys. When I say ‘warm welcome’, I do of course actually mean that they proceeded to scream at us, scratch at our ankles, I believe Charlie actually got bitch-slapped and a friend of Georgia’s from back home had his beer taxed by the behaviorally challenged host of primates. About 30 minutes after the monkeys had segregated us to a corner at the top of the temple, they suddenly took off altogether.

Totally unfazed and unquestioning as we were, we took the opportunity to have one last photo of the group together. It became clear very quickly why the monkeys had disappeared as the sky turned black… and the locust swarm struck!!! 5 minutes of mayhem ensued as we ran screaming all over the shop, screaming ‘Why!’ to the sky as we frantically pondered what we’d done to deserve a plague of such biblical proportions (it turned out some of us had left our shoes on when it clearly said to take them off. Sorry Buddha). When the sky was clear once more we headed down the steps we’d grown to hate so passionately, met the funkiest monk ever, bought some ice cream, crashed out on the floor and began our journey to meet the last Teaching Children volunteer, some Irish gypsy girl named Mary or Heather or something. All in all, a pretty cool day.

Written by the one and only 6 month intern John Boulton

Tiger Temple Side Trip