How many buses does it take to get to the center of Petcha-province?

This particular weekend Dana Gruber and I decided that not another week could go by without some sort of hiking expedition. My original plans to explore Chang Mai put on hold until the week of Songkran (check it out people - huge water festival!),I began looking into hiking options slightly closer to home... namely Kaeng Krachan National Park. Kaeng Krachan is the largest natl. park in Thailand, with dozens of hiking trails, diversity of widelife, waterfalls and campsites. We were craving waterfalls...
Our bodies however...
apparently were craving sleep, because we missed our targeted 8:30am departure and meandered out the door in true Kelsey - wait just a sec while I go back for one more thing - style, at 10:30am. Still decent time, but factor in the half hour of waiting to flag down the right[ie: cheapest (orange) bus *which we only paid 45BhT for :-D ], plus 2 odd hours of travel time and it's well past noon by the time we rolled into Buri-ville. Add to that the adventure of having no real idea where we were going because we had jumped a bus - final destination bangkok, which dropped us off across the highway from Big-C superstore instead the bus-stop intersection in Petchaburi where our Lonely Planet handbook told us we could easily snag a tuktuk or a small local line (truck). So technically I knew where we were (close to the Thai school where I help Ajan Jim, my thai teacher tutor kindergardeners) and I knew the general layout of downtown Petchaburi. I was merely disoriented if you will.... mildly confused by the fact that there were NO MOUNTAINS to be seen. I plan on bringing a topographical map on my next trip anywhere.... so useful!
So it turns out there were mountains, and hills for that matter. It's just that they were 47km west (mountains) and 5-ish km north (hills) of our current location and hidden behind massive amounts of modern sprawl. Ick. We hopped of the main drag ASAP! No highway exploring for us thankyouverymuch. We'll take the alleyways everytime. And so we did. Hopping walls, traversing bridges, following waterways and operating off of only the most general sense of direction (north*s*e*west)

lots of walking was involved

Dana spotted this one. He held still long enough for me to take 5-6 shots

Tri-annual Temple Festival and we were just on time!!

We might have been a little excited ;)

This lily was a surprise. Dana wasn't convinced it was real.

We couldn't believe it, but I took both these pictures from the same canal!

Just for you mom.

I liked how this tower was both functional (at one point in time) and artistic

the color of flowers here continues to astound me.
This lily was in a pot on a bridge

Reminds me of the tree in Swiss Family Robinson. We wanted to walk from one tree to another, but decided against bc we were in a Natl. Park

Summer palace of the king.

So tall... CAN YOU FIND DANA??!

Making friends with Mr. Tall Tree....
betcha Curious George could climb it!

Curious as always...

cool spot of shady. perfect for escaping the mid-day sun

We found the temple festival! and stopped in at a Buddhist service. Sat quietly in the back and just soaked it all in

So those hundreds of streamers hanging from the temple aren't streamers... their small packets of money. Gifts of goodwill

I wrote a small note thanking the monks for welcoming us and unexpectedly, in return on of them handed me a small stack of slips of paper folded in half, each of them containing a thin piece of gold foil. These we were told to carefully separate and press onto the gilded orbs (from thousands of bits of foil) and Buddha statues. Each time saying a prayer of thanks

NEMO!!!