For the past year, we’ve been relying on a Cefiro specialist in Khon Kaen for repair of our Cefiro A33 (Infiniti I30), and we had noticed a huge pagoda just down the street several times. A few weeks ago, we took the kids along with us and decided to visit the pagoda after dropping off our car to fix leaky power steering hoses. It was a great trip to a temple truly rich in history, Wat Nongwang (aka Wat Kaen Nakorn)

I never knew lotus flowers didn’t just look like that when they opened naturally…

These guys are from one of the ethnic villages in Surin where the government has granted them license to keep elephants. As elephants can eat hundreds of kilos of food every day and because there are simply too many to perform at the “elephant village” tourist attractions, many elephants are taken to towns across Thailand, especially the northeast, to walk the roads and beg for money for “food” – the handlers sell 3 baht bags of sugarcane or bananas for 20 baht to people along the way (people sitting outside of restaurants or pubs are popular targets). This practice has become so lucrative that we often hear of the villages…