Scavenger Hunting and Performances

This morning we were each assigned to a tuk-tuk, given a map and a series of questions to respond to and sent off into Luang Prabang to find our way around and respond to the questions on the form. We had our list of Lao phrases so that we could communicate in a rudimentary way with people in shops, the market etc. but there were moments of confusion when the tuk-tuk driver didn’t understand our instructions and we didn’t have the Lao words for places we needed to go! We first hit the morning market, the went to Ockpoktok where silk weaving is done. We saw women working the looms and the exhibit explains how silk is made and dyed. Then we found a monument to a former president of Laos. I’ve included a picture of Sam in front of the statue which was one of our assignments. We also visited a couple of temples. We went to an exhibit that explains a lot about the various ethnic minorities that make up Laos and they showed a fascinating video of an ordination ceremony among one of the groups that follows Taoism. The ordination ceremony takes 6 days and involves the entire village. It makes our ordination ceremonies look very simple and bland by comparison. When we emerged from that stop we discovered that the tuk-tuk we had been riding in had broken down and our driver handed us off to another tuk-tuk and driver to complete our rounds! We then went to a couple of temples which are very old and quite ornate. I love watching the monks float about the complex. When you get to a temple there is a whole campus there – the temple itself with the Buddha statue(s) but also a stupa, a dining hall for the monks, residence halls for the monks, and somewhere either a bell or a large drum or both.

We had lunch in a little French restaurant just down the road from our hotel. The food was all Lao food, however and it was excellent, as has been consistently the case on this trip. I tried the famed BeerLao, which is the local brew for which Laos is well known. It was good and refreshing and cheap! No wonder folks drink it like water here!

We had some free time in the afternoon and so I strolled down the main drag near the hotel visiting a couple of the temples along the way and browsing through the shops. It was raining heavily today so walking around outside got to be rather sticky and damp so I came back to the hotel and rested for a while before our evening adventures.

In the early evening we went to the Children’s Cultural Center where local school children did a puppet performance of the classic tale Ramayana (a Hindu tale but one that has been adapted even in Buddhist Southeast Asia as a classical religious myth.) Then the children also performed dances from the three dominant ethnic groups in Laos, the Highland Lao, Upland Lao and Lowland Lao. The children were dressed in the traditional costumes of the various ethnic groups. It was great fun and they invited us foreigners to join them in the dancing, which was amusing to say the least!! We were a clumsy lot compared to those kids!

After the session at the Cultural Center we went to dinner at a nearby restaurant, again enjoying delicious local Lao delicacies. We walked home through the rain by 9:30. It has truly been a soggy day here and it feels good to get into the air conditioned splendor of our hotel. Walking around outside in the rain and humidity becomes stifling after awhile!

More tomorrow!

Mekong River, Kamu Village, Pak Ou Caves

Sabaidee! (“Hello” in Lao) Today we had a long (as in 8 hours) ride down the Mekong from Pakbeng to Luang Prabang. We left Pakbeng at 8 AM and arrived in Luang Prabang about 5:15. The scenery along the way was beautiful. Majestic mountains dotted with the resting huts of the villagers who cultivate the sides of the mountains growing rice, corn and bananas. Even though it is the rainy season and therefore very cloudy the clouds hitting the tops of the mountains were beautiful to see. The first half of the day was very relaxing as we drifted along the river not seeing many other boats. The occasional speedboat would whizz by on its way to Luang Prabang (not the comfortable way to travel that distance if you could see how small those speedboats are!) and occasionally we saw a local fisherman out in his longboat but mostly we had the river to ourselves. We had a Lao language lesson with our guide for part of the morning so that we could learn the basic phrases we need to meet and greet the Lao people we are meeting along the way. Then we all had time to simply relax, read, take naps and enjoy the scenery. We had lunch on the boat again. Delicious Laotian food prepared by the family who owned the boat.

After lunch we made two stops. The first was to a Kamu village. The Kamu are “Upland Lao” peoples, one of the three minorities in Laos. There are the highland Lao (Hmong), the Upland Lao (Kamu) and the lowland Lao people (those who live in Luang Prabang and other cities). This was a riverside village, very tiny. Bamboo houses built on stilts, dirt paths through the village. There was a Buddhist temple there with a few monks even though the Kamu people are not Buddhist. Apparently the temple was there before this tribe settled its village there and they simply allowed the temple to stay and the monks to be part of their village life. We stopped at a basket weaving hut for our younger members to learn how to weave bamboo baskets. The Laotian people use the baskets to cook and serve their “sticky rice” a food staple of their diet. We also visited their rice fields and learned how rice is grown and observed a water buffalo hard at work tilling a rice paddy preparing it for planting. Then we went to the school where there are four classrooms for the village children. The children are out for the summer but in our honor they all gathered at the school to meet us and one of the village teachers was there as well to tell us about the schooling the children receive. The children in these villages are absolutely beautiful. One little fellow met us the minute we arrived and he scampered along with us through our entire tour. We called him our little shadow. He even came down to the river’s edge and sat and watched our boat pull away. I’ve included a picture of him. He’s the one in the long black t-shirt. We put our Lao language lesson into practice with the children, exchanging simple greetings and practicing our Lao on them. They found it highly amusing, I think. In the upper elementary age room, the children sang us a version of Frere Jacques and we all joined in. Then we sang the “ABC” song for them which amused them too. Their teacher is a member of the tribe and she was selected by the village elder to go on to university so that she could come back to teach the village children. She got her education for free (paid for by the village) but in return she has to teach in the village for seven years. The school rooms have no indoor lighting and are therefore pretty dark. They are simple one room cinderblock buildings with desks, a blackboard and chalk as about the sum total of resources available to the teacher.
Then we returned to the boat and continued down the river to our next stop, the Pak Ou caves. These are two caves right in the hillside on the river’s edge where the Lao people come to bring Buddha statues and offer prayers. The lower cave has over 4000 Buddha statues and the upper cave (a long climb up VERY STEEP steps) has about 1500 statues. The upper cave is so huge and dark you need flashlights to navigate inside and even then, it’s hard to see the statues. My pictures show me more of what was there than I could see with my naked eye! The statues and cave are maintained by local monks and villagers come to help the monks maintain the statues, cleaning and bathing them periodically.

We then finished our journey and arrived in Luang Prabang shortly after five in the midst of a heavy downpour. We are staying at the Villa Santi hotel right on the main street in Luang Prabang, which, while one of the major cities of Laos, is really a small town, population about 22,000. The hotel we’re in is gorgeous and we had a wonderful meal in an elegant dining room complete with traditional music accompaniment and classical dancers demonstrating Lao folk dances. We then meandered down to the night market which has every imaginable textile and handicraft of the hill tribe peoples that you could want. We’ll definitely return there before we leave this town! So that’s the report for today. As they say in Laos, pop kan mai (goodnight!)

Laos via the Mekong River

We rose very early this morning to leave Chiang Rai by 6 AM to make our way to Chiang Khong, a town in the far northeast of Thailand where we caught the boat to cross the Mekong River into Laos. Our first river crossing was in a very small, wooden longboat, which somehow handled all of us (9) plus our luggage and a couple of extra families as well with luggage! Once we got through passport control and obtaining visas we had a tuk-tuk ride to our boat for the long journey to Pakbeng. The journey takes about six hours by boat. It’s a beautiful, although rather small, wooden boat with booths to sit in, open windows, and a seating area with what look like seats taken from cars. We all opted for the booths. The family that is driving the boat actually live on it. We are in the public area and they have a private area at the back where they live and cook. They cooked our lunch which was, again, very tasty, and we noticed both the continuities and similarities to Thai cuisine and some subtle differences. The spices in the Lao food are more subtle and the food is somewhat more basic.

The scenery along the way is gorgeous. Mountains rise up on both sides of the river and you can see the fields where the farmers are planting their rice and corn crops on the hills. Dotted along the hills are little huts, with thatched roofs, which are rest huts for the farm workers. The fields are so far from their villages that the workers take food with them so that they can have lunch out in the fields and then take a brief nap before returning to work for the afternoon. The huts provide shelter from rain in this rainy season and from the sun in the dry season.

Our Lao guide, Lit, gave us a Lao language lesson. We learned basic words and phrases to get us through simple exchanges with local folks. Laos has only opened itself to tourism in the past two to three years, so they are not as well versed or well prepared for tourists as is Thailand. From what we have seen so far, Laos is clearly a poorer country than Thailand and the standard of living across the board is lower than Thai standard of living. We made a stop along the river to visit a Hmong village on the river’s edge. That was a sobering experience because it is really a classic example of developing world poverty. The families live in thatched huts with dirt floors. All the children sleep on one pallet in one corner of the room and the parents sleep in a sectioned off area of the room. There is no light inside the hut so it is very dark inside and the family cooks over an open fire which smokes the place up considerably but is helpful because it keeps the mosquitos away. There were swarms of children following us through the village, offering handicrafts for sale. Hmong people allow polygamy and have many, many children. And they have them young. In the house we visited the mother is only 16 years old and she has at least 4 children already. She also shares her husband with a couple of other women who also have multiple children. The men were away in the fields working so we saw only women and children during our visit. The children are educated in Laotian schools and they learn Lao language in addition to their Hmong dialect. But the absence of basic sanitation, access to clean water, and health care was glaring. We saw some satellite dishes and one hut/home had a TV going so they have some electricity in some of their buildings but it is very limited. The children were dressed in dirty and ragged clothing however, and none of them looked as though they had been bathed recently and they were all barefoot. The children were gorgeous and cute and lively, but we all felt so badly about the conditions under which they are living. Our guide said that the Hmong are usually “highland Laotians” meaning they live on the tops of the mountains, so the fact that these Hmong are down at the river’s edge is unusual. The reason, apparently, is that the Lao government received substantial sums of money from the US government to move them to the lowlands to cut down on illegal growing of opium crops, and the US money was supposed to go towards providing subsidies for the villages so that they could have a decent standard of living and find jobs. Government corruption, however, has ensured that the Hmong villagers are not benefiting from the money the US has sent over for them.

Our ride on the river took about 6 hours at which time we arrived at Pakbeng, a small village on the shores of the river. We are staying at a beautiful lodge right on the water. Our rooms overlook the river and we have a terrace to sit on looking out on the river and the mountains on the other side. It is very hot and humid, however, and there is no air conditioning here so we are trying to get used to being very sticky until we get to Luang Prabang tomorrow and back into an air conditioned hotel. We took a walk through Pakbeng, which takes only about 15 minutes as it is a very small village and we wandered through the market. We will have dinner here at the lodge and then, I suspect retire early as there is not much else to do and we’ve been up since 4:30 this morning. Tomorrow we have another 8 hours on the river to get to Luang Prabang.

The pictures here show our boat looking towards the back, a view of the mountains from the river, which is the scenery we’ve been enjoying all day, a shot of a couple of the Hmong children we saw today and our hotel. It’s been a full day. More tomorrow.

Opium Museum and Golden Triangle

Today we traveled north to the border that is known as the “golden triangle” on the Mekong River where Myanmar(Burma), Thailand and Laos all come together. First we visited the Hall of Opium, an excellent interactive museum that chronicles the history of opium use throughout the world and the spread of opium around the world from ancient times to the modern era. It demonstrates everything from how opium is grown and harvested and turned into drug form, to the political intricacies of the opium trade throughout history. We spent much of the morning in that museum and it was really absorbing. We wound up staying overtime because we became so engrossed in the material. Opium in now illegal in Thailand and cannot be grown here, although the black market for opium still exists in the “golden triangle” region notwithstanding the laws against it.

Then we went to a small Akha tribe village that was truly “off the beaten path” in a serious way! We parked at the Golden Triangle visitors site and then boarded a very small farmers work truck (see picture) and struck off into the hills through rice paddies on dirt roads that are flooded and muddy from the rains. Truly the ride on those roads makes winter in Rochester look like smooth sailing! We saw many farmers out planting the rice crops as we passed field after field. It has been raining pretty consistently since we got to Chiang Rai and the rice fields are fully flooded and the dirt roads up there are a muddy, potholed mess! We wound up at a very small restaurant run by an Akha tribe family that is truly in the middle of nowhere. You could only find the place by knowing from someone that it exists because you can’t even get there without someone to drive a farm truck to take you there. We were served delicious barbecued chicken, yellow rice and grass noodles and then crepes with pineapple in sugarcane syrup for dessert. The food was excellent. The restaurant is on a hill and the woman who prepared our food had just come in from the rice fields to make our meal and was on her way back to continue planting rice after we left! We got some pictures with the Akha family that run the restaurant before we left one of which I’ve posted here.

Then we went back to the visitors site at the Golden Triangle where we climbed to the top of a shrine where there is a magnificent view of the Mekong River and Myanmar and Laos on the other side. There were several Buddhist shrines, one of which dates from the 7^th century. We explored around the shrines and took in the incredible view of the river that we’ll be sailing on tomorrow. (Picture above) We also visited an elephant shrine. (Picture included) The locals believe that it is good luck to walk beneath an elephant so people go to this shrine and walk under the elephants three times for luck. We all took our turn before departing for home. This evening, mercifully, is a free evening and we are all looking forward to a quiet night in the hotel to relax and unwind. We’ve been going at a pretty hectic pace ever since we arrived and we can use some R&R. We’ve also got to pack before we go down for the night as we leave unbelievably early tomorrow.

Tomorrow we have to be up by 5 AM to leave at 6 to head back to the border region where we were today. Tomorrow we cross into Laos so we need to allow time for processing at the border (visas to purchase, passport control etc.) We will be on a river cruise boat all day tomorrow and Tuesday, spending tomorrow night in a lodge in Pakbeng, Laos, along the way. I will try to post tomorrow night, but I understand I will only have internet access in the bar/restaurant area of the lodge we’re staying at so I will have to see what the scene is like there and how easy or not it is to get online. If I don’t post tomorrow, you’ll get a double dose the next day!

Hill Tribes and Cooking

This morning we went first to the Hill Tribe Museum and Cultural Center in downtown Chiang Rai for an orientation and overview information session about the various hill tribes that live up in the mountains in this region of Thailand. Many of these tribes have migrated from Myanmar (Burma) and China. They live up in the mountains, in the forested areas. The different tribes have different customs, modes of dress, ways of making their living and different belief systems although most of them are animist. A couple of the tribes, especially the Hmong and Karen have been heavily missionized by Christian missionaries and so tend to be Christian and some of the tribes have absorbed a lot of Thailand’s Buddhism, although they’ve not abandoned their own animist beliefs. The government runs a series of programs through the cultural center to try to improve the conditions for the hill tribes and to help them adjust to modernity while also preserving their own unique culture. They focused initially on family planning - the hill tribe people tend to have many children which only exacerbates their poverty. The government launched a heavy and persistent family planning campaign with the hill tribe people which they call “Cabbages and Condoms” in an effort to promote the use of birth control and safe sexual practices. There are a couple of stores/restaurants called “Cabbages and Condoms” which really go to town with the condom theme, having very funny posters, mugs, glassware all promoting condom use. They adopted the slogan “Our food guaranteed not to make you pregnant.” These shops are part of the government outreach to the hill tribe people and everything sold in the shops is made by the hill tribe people and they get a substantial portion of the revenue from the sale of their goods. The museum has a wonderful exhibit explaining how the hill tribe people have lived in the mountains for centuries, their way of life and their involvement in the opium trade. Many of these tribes were huge producers of poppies until the government outlawed the growing of poppies in Thailand. The tribes themselves suffered from the ravages of opium addiction as well, and the government ban on poppy cultivation is aimed at that as well as at eliminating the illegal drug market for opium.

After we left the cultural center, a guide from the center joined us and we drove up into the hills to visit a village of the Akha tribe. This is a real, living village of Akha tribespeople who make their living farming rice and corn, weaving and making clothing and bags and other textile products and also doing silver smithing, making beautiful silver jewelry that they sell to tourists. At this point, tourism is part of their sources of revenue. They welcome groups like ours to their village to demonstrate how they live and they earn money for their village from the entrance fees and souvenirs that they sell to the tourists. It was like stepping back in time to the days of early cave dwellers when we entered their village. Their homes are all made of bamboo, with no windows. They have dirt floors, and two rooms – one where the men sleep and one where the women sleep and do the cooking. We went into one home and it was amazing to see how completely primitive were the conditions, while at the same time they have a satellite dish with a TV and VCR/DVD player in their little hut! The interior is very dark, lit only by a couple of fluorescent bulbs, one in each room. The combination of modernity and primitive living was a bit disconcerting to say the least. We were shown how they trap animals, with traps they make out of bamboo and metal that they forge. Then some of the women demonstrated one of their traditional dances and several of our group joined in the dance, including Sam! We walked all through the village and saw the church that the missionaries built (a much more modern structure and more solidly built than anything the Akha people live in , I noticed). It was quite an experience to be in the midst of this time warp. It was fascinating to learn from them how they use the various plants and herbs that grow in the mountains for cooking and for medicinal purposes. They truly know the land and know how to live off of it. Their lifestyle is simple and ancient, but with this odd fusion of some aspects of modernity, like the TVs and a plethora of mopeds zipping around the dirt paths. Walking around their village is a workout. They are in the mountains so the little dirt paths that make up their roads are steep, and muddy and rocky. While it is fascinating to learn about their culture and visit the village, I felt like there was nothing to romanticize about their lives. It is a hard life in those mountains, living in small bamboo huts, cooking over open fires inside the huts (with the attendant smoke just part of the atmosphere – useful for discouraging mosquitos) and tending to rice paddies and corn fields spread out over the mountains, a good hike from the village. The children of the village are required to attend Thai schools, but have to get there on their own. There are no schoolbuses, so the families in the village have to provide their own transportation to school. In the area we visited today there are a lot of hill tribe villages so there is a school just for that population not too far away, but for some of the tribes that are more remotely located, it can be a real challenge to get the children to school.

From the village we went to lunch in a lovely restaurant in the mountains where we were seated in an open air dining area with the mountains surrounding us. We returned to our hotel and had a brief break before reconvening for our Thai cooking class. The first part of that class was going to the local market in Chiang Rai to buy the ingredients for the three dishes we were cooking. That market makes most American farmer’s markets look like child’s play! Every imaginable fruit, vegetable, fish and animal product you could think of was there somewhere and the place was bustling with activity. The locals here go to the market every day to get what they need for that night’s meal. The market is open a few hours in the morning and then a few hours in the late afternoon/early evening. When we got back to our hotel from the market the chef showed us how to prepare three different Thai dishes. The food was delicious. A shrimp and pork salad, a chicken in coconut soup, and a green curried beef dish were on the menu. The curried beef dish was HOT but excellent. After cooking the meal, we enjoyed eating it on a veranda at our hotel and then retired early for the evening, much to my relief. These days have been long and exhausting, so I’m looking forward to an early night tonight.

More tomorrow….

Chiang Rai

Today we left Chiang Mai and rode up through the hills a little over a hundred miles to the city of Chiang Rai in the far north of Thailand. The ride was beautiful through the hills and forests and into the agricultural heartland of Northern Thailand. We saw farmers out planting the rice in the rice paddies and stopped at a rice mill where we learned how the rice is processed from the harvested plant to what is shipped to our stores and tables. As we rode along through the forested area we saw hundreds of trees wrapped with saffron ribbons, the same color as the robes the monks wear. Deforestation was a terrible problem for Thailand as it sought to modernize in the last half of the 20th century and now the government is working to replant the forests as much as possible. To deter people from coming in and illegally cutting down trees the monks agreed to go out and bless the trees and wrap them with the sash from their robes. The Thais say these trees are now “ordained” monk trees. The effect is that no one will touch them because to cut one of those trees would be the same as killing a monk, something unthinkable in this deeply Buddhist culture. It was fun to look at the woods and see all these “ordained” trees sporting their saffron robes, safe from poachers and investors who might want to ravage what is left of the natural beauty of these forests.

On our way into Chiang Mai, we stopped at a very unusual and modern Buddhist temple, built by a wealthy artist, Chalermchai Kositpipat, who built an incredible and very unusual structure quite unlike the traditional temples everywhere else in the country. His artwork is fantastic, a blend of traditional Buddhist art and very modern art. There is a gallery of his work at the temple complex and then the inside of the temple is a huge mural done by him which depicts all the levels of heaven and hell and earth. He includes scenes and persons from the modern world, including Michael Jackson, sports figures, cartoon characters like Spiderman, and an amazing artistic rendition of the 9/11 Twin Towers burning. Truly, his work is spectacular and I only wish photos were permitted so I could have captured it. The temple includes the usual huge Buddha statue and painting of the Buddha but surrounded by all these scenes from history, ancient and modern. Really a spectacular place. There were a lot of people there today because today is a religious holiday in Thailand, the beginning of the Buddhist Lent period. People have off from work and there are processions to the temples with offerings of flowers and candles to the Buddha. This particular temple is not much frequented by tourists, but is a popular place of pilgrimage for local peoples, according to our guide. We did not have much time to visit there and it is certainly a place I would love to return to and spend more time.

When we arrived in Chiang Rai we had lunch in a little tiny restaurant with delicious northern Thai dishes. Chicken curry with lemongrass and mint, sweet and sour fish, spareribs in a green curry sauce, fried rice, spring rolls, a chicken salad with fruits and very tasty dressing, finished off with coconut milk ice cream and local pineapples, which are the size of apples. Absolutely delicious food and we all left stuffed. Thai food is truly delicious and plentiful!!

We checked into our new digs for the next three days. We are in a lovely sprawling spa resort which is outside of the town a bit and very scenic. It’s very hot and humid today so walking around outside for any length of time is rather exhausting. Sam and I opted to crash in the air conditioned comfort of our room and enjoy the free (yay!!) internet and get some nap time in.

Then we went into town for a rickshaw ride around the city. First we went into another temple to observe the rituals that were going on honoring the holy day the Buddhists are celebrating today. We heard part of a monk’s “sermon” although none of it was comprehensible to us. Then towards the end of our long rickshaw ride, we stopped on a main thoroughfare just before 7 right in front of an ornate and enormous clocktower (see picture –words escape me!) which at 7, 8 and 9 every evening goes through this amazing process of changing colors multiple times, and music plays on really good speakers all over the square, while the tower continues to change colors and the mechanisms inside move around and change and new weights on the end of the ball morph and change into other things. It’s hard to describe because it is truly unique and quite a site to behold. This tower was made by the same artist who built the temple we saw earlier in the day and he equipped it with the intricate and ornate mechanisms that go through the changing ritual. Makes the chiming of Big Ben in London seem rather pedestrian! And the sound quality of the speakers is really fantastic. The music booms out around the area and is very evocative. What is funny is watching the Chiang Rai residents (for whom this is routine) continue driving around the clocktower and walking the streets as if nothing unusual or interesting is going on!!

After our rickshaw ride we ate in another small but excellent restaurant for what has become our usual 4 course meal with appetizers and platters of fruit for dessert. I’ve come to enjoy a fruit called rambutan – its red with spiky/hairy things sticking out of it and looks completely unappealing, but when you open it up there is this sweet, juicy white fruit inside that is really good. Can’t judge a fruit by its appearance here! Truly, we are eating like kings on this trip and the food is absolutely delicious. After dinner we had some time to wander the night market until it started raining so hard we all opted to leave early and come back to the hotel. It is the rainy season here, and in the late evening the downpours tend to be the worst. And we’re all pretty tired. These days start very early and run very late!

Tomorrow – Thai cooking and learning about the Hill Tribes. Until then…!

Elephants

Today was elephant day. We drove up into the mountains, about an hour north of Chiang Mai to an elephant preserve. Elephants are sacred animals in Thailand but destruction of their natural habitat and hunting by poachers has reduced their population from over 100,000 in the early 20th century to a mere 5000 now. There are now concerted attempts to increase the population and to create natural habitats where the elephants can live safely and be cared for humanely. Until the early 80’s elephants were used for the logging industry, helping to clear teak forests and drag logs for that industry. When the Thai government outlawed logging teak and began to control the deforestation of teak forests, the elephants were out of work. That is when they became big players in the growing tourist industry. Many of the villagers who own elephants rely on them for their main income. The problem is that the traditional way of training them is, in many cases, abusive to the animals. The preserve that we visited today rescues abused and abandoned animals and also goes around the country providing free medical care to villagers who own work elephants and also tries to educate them in humane ways to care for and train the animals. I’m really glad that we were seeing animals who are being treated humanely, because we were shown a video which depicted some very inhumane treatment of animals and it was horrifying!

When we first arrived we bought some food to give the elephants and Sam fed sugar cane and bananas to several of the elephants. He also sat on one and the elephant had a good time teasing him with her trunk and reaching up for food. I’ve posted pictures of Sam on elephant for your viewing pleasure! We then watched the elephants go into the river for a swim which was great fun as they cavort (as much as an animal that size can be said to cavort!!) in the water and they enjoy coming up with a trunk full of water and spraying the tourists with it. We all got an elephant shower during that segment! After that they have a show where the elephants perform various tricks and entertainment. They played harmonicas (yes harmonicas) by holding them with their trunks and blowing through them. It was very funny. They played soccer and it was amazing to see how they could kick those balls into the goal! Then they actually painted pictures. They stood at an easel with paintbrushes and paint and drew pictures – two of them drew trees and one drew an elephant! The “mahouts” are the villagers who care for and train the elephants. They usually come by the job through long time family tradition and a mahout will usually work with his or her animal for life, often with the elephant outliving the human. Elephants life span is about 80-90 years. The bond between mahout and elephant is very strong and it was incredible to watch how the mahouts and their elephants interacted.

Then after the show we got our ride on the elephants and that was truly the highlight of the day. The elephants are very sure footed, which is a good thing as we were walking up very steep hills in the forest and along very narrow footpaths in the forest, after first crossing the river which required the elephant to walk down a steep ramp into the water. We discovered that as passengers on the elephant the downhill stretches were the most precarious and we were holding onto the crossbar of our seat for dear life trying not to slide out onto the elephants shoulders and then to the ground!! Our elephant was very hungry and kept stopping to “snack” on grass, vegetation and tree branches as we moved along. I said to Sam, “This gives a whole new meaning to the words “trail mix!” Our elephant had a particular proclivity for getting near the edge of the path which was on a steep hill so Sam and I decided we had to not look down while the elephant grazed!! I’ve included a picture of us atop the elephant, taken by the mahout when we stopped along the way for the elephants to snack. (Elephants eat A LOT. Apparently they consume about 10% of their body weight in food each day – roughly 300 pounds of food a day. And they are complete vegetarians.)

Then we went to another part of the preserve, where young elephants and older, “retired” elephants or elephants that are disabled in some way roam freely on many acres. Several elephant families came to the riverside so the tourists could participate in bathing them and then feeding them. There were two baby elephants who got a lot of attention from the tourists. It was fascinating to watch the elephants interact with each other. They form strong family bonds and friendship bonds and they are highly intelligent and emotional animals. We had a great time watching them interact with each other and the humans who were feeding and bathing them.

Then we returned to Chiang Mai and had a brief break before leaving for dinner at the Galleria restaurant, which was lovely, as it is on the riverbank. We had a table right next to the river and enjoyed our Thai food while watching the boats go up and down the river. It was a beautiful scene with the city lights reflecting on the water and candles on the tables, not to mention the delicious Thai cuisine. When we got back to the hotel Sam and I made ourselves go out to the Night Market across the street because we leave here tomorrow for Chiang Rai, further north, and we wanted to do some shopping before we depart. Both of us are still exhausted and are looking forward to sleeping on the bus ride to Chiang Rai tomorrow (as are most of our travelling companions!!)