The Simple Life of SamBerDang, Thailand

What brought us to SamBerDang was a friend of a friend from the States, Eldon Hill. We won't venture into the story about how we ran across Eldon, but we give thanks to him and the beautiful thai girls we stayed with for a week in the village. BunLueng (22), Mae (12), Ben (15) and Eldon made us feel so welcome in their home and taught us much about the simple life of those in the region.

A quick depiction of the village of SamBerDang:
28 homes, loosely related families, rice farmers with an average yearly income of 750 US dollars, one main dirt road, one shack for meetings, a well to pump water being built by funds as a gift from the king (200,000 baht/5000 US dollars given yearly to each village by the king no matter what size the village!), cows/bulls/buffalo roaming the dirt road/yards/dry winter fields, day in and day out sleeping thais abound outside as this is the off season for rice harvesting, and most of all: EACH AND EVERY FACE IS LIT WITH A SMILE!

Our days consisted of exercising, walking the dirt roads of the villages soaking in the rays of the glimmering sun and clean air, taking drives to visit the internet, sauntering through local markets for fresh food, watching movies, singing karaoke, and MORE COOKING!! We took a couple one day excursions, one of them being our "visa run" to Laos to renew our thai visas and to a new temple in the building process for over 20 years. Our next blog will detail those adventures.

We appreciated the slowness of the lifestyle as it refreshed and renewed our traveling souls. We are so happy to be back on the road again, after making our home in Chiang Mai for quite sometime. Getting a glimpse into the lives of the Isaan people was a chance most people in the west will never experience. In certain moments we would stop and just take a deep breath in, reminding ourselves what we were actually doing and taking part in. It is much that our overly progressive cultures could learn from to find balance.