We Are Not in Thailand Yet

But on Friday, we will be.

The San Francisco airport is boring, we're so surprised. Except the art, the art we appreciate. But not the lack of beds. Note to SFO: install more beds. We are halfway through our six (6!) hour layover. Then we go to Beijing, where another multi-hour layover awaits us (which due to indecipherable time zones, I cannot decipher the exact number of hours thereof). I will use this layover to introduce our endeavor.

Phil and I are going to Thailand to volunteer on organic farms, learning about permaculture and sustainability in a warmer climate than rainy Portland, Oregon. The umbrella organization is WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which is like a dating website for farms. Farms post info about themselves, what they grow, whether they like long walks on the beach, and when they're available to host volunteers (aka WWOOFers). We've lined up dates well into May, and at sixty-day intervals (or so) we'll abide by our tourist visas and take a sojourn through one of the neighboring Southeast Asian countries.

Our flight is scheduled to land in Bangkok on Friday morning. Then we're running errands, like getting Thai cell phones, picking up emergency malaria medication, and buying train tickets to Chiang Mai. The plan is to scoot on up north right away on an overnight train and stay in Chiang Mai for a few days--ostensibly to give our Japanese Encephalitis (a truly nasty brain infection; I encourage you to look it up) vaccines a chance to kick in. But mostly it is to see beautiful Chiang Mai for a bit before taking the bus down to the Mae Wang province, where we will be staying for the first month.

Fingers crossed it all goes according to plan! More or less.

PS: A note on the title of the blog. Since Thai doesn't include the syllable ph, which inconveniently pops up in both of our names, we've decided to make it easy on our hosts by picking travel pseudonyms. We could've gone way out there, and been like, Amelie and Don (Quixote), but instead we made our own names into funny words: Step and Pil. It is an apt metaphor for how we will likely blunder our way through the sub-continent. And SEA stands for South East Asia. Tada!