Heatstroke and bad audio quality be damned... the things we do to bring you great travel stories. Bamboo rockets to force the sky god to bring the rain. Hugging it out with an elk. What more do you want in a travel podcast?
Things are heating up here in Thailand, but hopefully a break in the weather is in sight. And sorry for the less-than-perfect audio for the first half of this week’s show. We didn’t take our good equipment with us to the festival (more on that in a moment), so we did it the old way with our headsets and phones. Still, it was a story that needed to be told. Perhaps by less exhausted people, but we work with what we have.
Two more stories on today’s show, one from Thailand and one from Canada that is uniquely Canadian:
1. Thailand Takes On SpaceX
Music credit: Upbeat Forever by Kevin MacLeod
It’s called the Bun Bang Fai Festival, and it happens every year in northeastern Thailand. We flew up to see what this rarely-seen strange festival was all about. And boy how, did we. Bamboo “rockets” (sans fins) are jam-packed with 265 pounds of hand-mixed gunpowder, and then strapped to wooden scaffolding some 40 feet in the air by drunken villagers. And then lit on fire. Yeah. That happened.
2. Don’t Hug The Elk
Music credit: Inspired by Kevin MacLeod
Filmmaker Jesse Harley learned his lesson about interacting with wildlife the hard way. Because even when you’re trying to do the right thing for a grieving friend, nature doesn’t give two shits. Every Canadian knows not to feed the bears. Apparently, that common knowledge doesn’t extend to elk hugging. Which is a thing?
And that’s the show!
Next week, we’re going to take a nice and cool trip down to an island called Koh Yao Noi, where Evo will be be taking over the Tripit snapchat account on Saturday. No heat stroke. No rockets. Just a cool time on the beach. And just in time for the rainy season. Nice planning.
Special thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the songs used in this episode.
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New episodes of the The Opportunistic Travelers Podcast are available every Tuesday. Of course, Tuesday can be a very different thing depending on where we are in the world. Cheers!
