Day 15:John Carlson

Hello everyone,

My name is John Carlson and I am a sophomore at the Massachusetts

Maritime Academy in the International Maritime Business Major. I attended Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines North Carolina.

I am so thankful to Dr. Ghosh and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Thailand for experiential learning.

Today is February 15th, and since it is Saturday, we are having a fun day. We were all up early this morning and had a light breakfast of fruit and waffles. Next, we loaded into the vans at 7:30 AM for our trip to Kanchanaburi Province to the Erawan National Park. Leading up to today

all our group members knew that the Erawan National Park had many waterfalls and it made us all very excited to go.

Our trip took about 4 hours which was one of our longest drives of the EL and most of us slept for the majority of it. Once we arrived at Erawan National Park we had a short drive in golf carts to the beginning of our hike. There were 7 seven stops along the way, and each stop had small waterfalls

and freshwater lagoons that you could swim in. It was some of the clearest water I’ve ever seen.

We all split up into little groups depending on how far we wanted to go, my group went all the way to the top. The lagoons and waterfalls at the 7th level were beautiful, and there were fish swimming all around and small caves which we could swim through. It was absolutely fascinating.

After the steep trek to the top, the freshwater felt very refreshing.

We stayed at the top for about 30 minutes and then decided to head back down.

On our way back down, we stopped at each of the other levels. We also met other

Americans who were in Thailand teaching English for a year. It was very interesting talking to them and sharing our experiences.

At the 4th level we were able to slide down the waterfalls. We spent almost an hour there and had a great time. The fish at this lagoon were massive and were incredibly

comfortable swimming all around us.

On the way back to AIT we stopped at Mcdonalds for dinner. We were all very tired from the day and once we got back we all went right to bed. Looking back, this was one of my favorite day’s of the entire trip. Thank you so much for following along!