Who’s in control – Elephant or Man?
Friday, July 01, 2005
1 July 2005
Today we went on our one day trek. This involved an elephant ride, a walk to a couple of mountain villages, a swim in a waterhole, lunch at a local roadside restaurant & a bamboo raft ride.
Elephant ride.
Swimming at the waterhole
After a short drive South West of Chiang Mai City, we arrived at the elephant trek. We were both relieved to see that on the surface they treat the elephants well. We had heard of some companies using a small dagger to control the elephants, but our guides used a little bamboo stick to guide the elephant & seemed to their body position to do most of the controlling of direction. As we went through the jungle, the elephant was allowed to pretty much do as it wanted, with ours being more adventurous & hungry than most! There were a couple of times where we got a small private detour through the jungle for food – well they do eat about 150kg of food a day! But the guide just let him be for a few minutes, before manouvering it back on to the track to catch up with the rest of the group. Can honestly say from experience, that an elephant running is a smoother ride than when it is walking! From here we went to the Mountain village, interesting to see how they live. A very simple life! Ahhh……
Looking back towards the mountain village from the trek
Right. Now the next stop was lunch. We had taken a bit of bread just in case (& other people had done the same!) but as it turns out there was no need. Lunch was fantastic! Have a feeling they turned down the spice-ometer level for us Western folk! It certainly wasn’t lacking in flavour though! A chicken & pepper dish, lots of rice (if all else fails, eat rice) a potato dish (they seem to have quite sweet potatoes here, I think they might do them with honey?) & a vegetable dish. Everyone loved it.
And just when we were thinking the day was pretty much over, we remembered we still had the bamboo rafting to go! And it was starting to rain… (it’s the beginning of monsoon season). But it only ever drizzled for about 5 minutes at a time – enough to cool the air down a bit. Was a nice ‘lazy-river’ typw ride, although Maarty got to be the ‘captain’ on our raft & had to help maneurver the raft.
All in all a great time, and as you may have noticed I haven’t really mentioned any trkking… vecause there was very little – about an hour and a half tops. (which is lucky ‘cause one of the British girls was wearing jandals. In the jungle. On a dirt track. CLEVER.)
posted by Maarty @ 3:21 am,
1 Comments:
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At Sunday, 03 July, 2005,
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Sounds amazing. This is a fantastic system of hearing and seeing what you're up to. I am amazed you are finding the time to keep updating, but then Charlie used to write letters every night. It's just they took days to be finished and then weeks to arrive! This is so instantaneous.Thanks!