Riding an Elephant...

Was not as exciting as I had hoped (motion sickness), but the long-tail boat ride up the Golden Kok River to the Elephant Village was worth thirty minutes of nausea. Good lord, what a trip! The lush landscape—breathtaking, unruly, indecisive—was reminiscent of Vietnam war movies. I took a lot of pictures, most of them bad, but here are few…

 

Long-tail boat, Golden Kok River

When we arrived we fed the elephants shoots of sugar cane and laughed our tails off as they deftly took and curled them into their grotesque mouths. There’s something surreal about standing next to a creature like this. The eyes are altogether too big and wet and old-mannish, the trunk too snake-like. Standing next to an elephant makes you feel a little ridiculous.

Keith feeding an elephant with obvious joy

Anyway, before climbing the stairs to board one of the waiting elephants (there were probably a dozen or more roped up or loping around), my new friend Keith (team instigator, cultural ice-breaker, teddy bear) spied a local smoking something rolled in a banana leaf and managed to coax her to roll he and I a couple for 10 baht (about 30 cents). Keith is both adventurous and a cigar connoisseur, so this didn’t surprise me. She smiled and found her pouch and spread what looked like stringy tobacco into the leaf, and from a small wooden box sprinkled little white and brown squares of something over the tobacco before rolling the leaf up tight. Keith tucked them away in his backpack for later (see a later post for the result).

Rider straddling elephant head (photo by Marah Grant)

View from elephant

On the boat ride back I sat transfixed next to Keith who spent twenty minutes describing the various qualities and urban dangers of the ficus tree, many of which were growing or dying along the banks of the Golden Kok. As strange as it might sound, this too was a highlight of the trip for me, listening to Keith riff on trees.