‘You didn’t think into the future or anything, you’re just living for that moment.’

Krista Hammel went to Japan last summer with a friend, Vicki Essary, 18, to visit Vicki’s sister who lives in Tokyo. After working and sightseeing for a month, the two Canyon Country girls decided to take a side trip instead of coming directly home. Krista, 16, a senior at Canyon High School, lives in Canyon Country with her mother, Gaye, and brother, Robb. We stayed in Japan about a month and then a friend told us about how her friends had gone to Thailand. A couple of people from Singapore told us you can ride elephants there. And, we said, “Well OK, let’s go.”

That’s when we called up our parents and asked them to wire us more money because we wanted to go to Thailand, including a tropical island called Koh Samui. My mom got a little worried about that. She asked the travel agent and he hadn’t heard of it because it’s not on the map. At first, she’s like, “Krista, are you sure you know where you’re going?”

It was kind of frightening, because before we went people were telling us all these horror stories about Thailand, how rough it was, and how everyone carried a gun there, and also the malaria. But we weren’t going to be chickened out of it.

So we went to Thailand for about three weeks. We took the malaria pills, to be safe, because we had planned on going up north into the jungle. And that’s what we ended up doing.

Everything we did was on an impulse, that’s what was neat about it, we didn’t really plan anything. We just went. We went on a four-day hike through the jungle. So we stayed with the village tribes, and everything, and we had to go climbing through the swamps. You would have mud up to your knees if you stepped in the wrong spots. And my shoes ended up stained brown from all the mud.

It was very difficult. Our backpacks seemed so heavy by the end of the day. There was a lot of climbing, the mountains kept going up as we went towards Laos and Burma. At the end of the day you were so tired because you’d get up real early and hike all day.

In this one village we saw this old man, and he was probably like 75 or something, sitting there and smoking opium. He’s all wrinkled up, and he looked like he was gonna fall over. It was really weird seeing the old grandparents doing that kind of stuff.

It rained constantly. It was so pretty though, it was so green, and the tropical rains are so neat. It was hot up there, and the rain always refreshed you, because you always felt so dirty.

We also rode elephants and that was fun. It was kinda scary though, ‘cause the elephants were going on the edge of these cliffs, and you look over the side, and it’s down. The only thing that was guiding the elephant was a little Thai kid sitting on the elephant’s head, pulling its ears, while he was smoking opium. So it was really interesting.

No one ever wore a watch, you never knew what time it was, you never knew what day it was, everything went by so slow, and you just worried about what was happening at that time. You didn’t think into the future or anything, you’re just living for that moment. And it was really fun.

When we were up in the middle of the jungle and there was barely any food, you get so tired and hungry. I just couldn’t wait to get on the island and lay out in the sun and eat, take a shower and relax.

The island was the best part of the trip. I wanted to live there. The water was beautiful, it was warm. We lived in family bungalows right on the beaches, with the toilets in the ground, and everything.

Next summer we plan to go backpacking through Europe, staying in youth hostels. But there’s so much in Europe, it’ll take us a couple summers.

As for a career, I want to become a doctor. I want to find cures for diseases like AIDS and cancer, go into the laboratories of medical research. So I want to hurry and do all my traveling now, and before I get really involved with my career. There’s so little time to do all that I want to do.