Suda

Saturday February 13 2010

One of the best things about Thailand is that if you aren't from there, chances are everything will seem cheap to you. Aiola and I rented a driver for the day for about 1000 bhat, which is about 40 Sing dollars. This was a fantastic move because not only did we have someone to take us where we wanted to go, we could do it on our own schedule and have a Thai guide when we needed it. The first stop of the day was to the Elephant Sanctuary. The entrance ticket included an "elephant show" to start things off. To be honest, I was only half interested expecting that I would watch elephants walk around in a circle holding each other's tails for half an hour. What I saw couldn't have been further from that. While it was true that the show started off relatively simple, demonstrating how elephants could act on command, how they were used as work animals to pick up logs etc, I quickly became amazed at how intelligent these animals were, and what they were capable of. I've posted the pictures of what I'm about to describe because words alone can not, excuse the pun, "paint the picture". The trainer gave one of the elephants a paintbrush and it walked over to an easel and started painting. What I expected was random brush strokes, what I got was definite curves, clearly with intention behind them. Soon these curves started taking shape and I was saying outloud, "doesn't it look like he's drawing an elephant?!" Sure enough within a few minutes, this incredible creature had drawn an elephant picking a flower off of a tree, and like any good artist, he didn't leave without signing his name "Suda" before he was finished.

Excited after that display of intelligence, I was ready to get on one of these massive animals and go for a ride. On the elephants back, a chair was secured down with rope from which Aiola and I sat perched looking down upon the jungle floor. At first I felt unstable as the elephant took his massive steps, but after a while it became a rhythmic movement that I became used to. After a short time, we came to a river that the elephants crossed with ease which would have been up to my neck if I were to attempt to cross on my own. We stopped along the way to feed the elephants bundles of banannas which it ate in one gulp. After tipping my elephant handler 20 bhat, he got off of the elephant and took pictures of me "driving" the elephant. In order to do that I had to climb out of the chair and onto the elephants head. It was such a cool feeling to be so close to the elephant, except for when he got close to a ridge and started bending down to pull on some foliage to eat. I thought I was going to slip off of his head and down the hill, but the trainer yelled a command and the elephant backed right into place. After about an hour we ended our elephant journey and rode an ox cart back into town for some lunch. Wanting to relax, Aiola thought that she would check out the fish spa. To my surprise this was exactly what it sounded like, a fish, spa. It works like this, you put your feet in a large tank filled with hundreds of small fish. They immediately swim up to you and start nibbling on your feet eating off all the dead skin. I put my hand in there to get an idea of what it felt like. It was a sensation unlike anything I had felt before, but I could tell that the tickely feeling would be too much for my feet and I would end up pulling half of the fish out of the water.

After Aiola finished with her fish massage, we walked back down to the same river that we had crossed earlier that day on the elephant, and started down stream on our bamboo raft. this was steered with a long bamboo poll and was very relaxing to laydown and cool down on the river getting some sun and a nice breeze. When we reached a point down the river, we exited to find our driver already waiting for us ready to take us to our next destination, the long necked village. This was something that I had seen on National Geographic, and I must admit that my expectations were high.

When we arrived at the long neck village it was really just a collection of merchant stands that the women were running. I was immediately disappointed. After some thought I asked myself what I was really expecting? AFter all, this is the twenty first century, and these people needed to make a living just like anyone else and selling small trinkets seems like the best way to make ends meet when you already have a captive market in tourists that have an innate interest in their culture. These people really were beautiful in their dress and their elegant long necks. I had the chance to pick up on of the metal pieces that they wear around their neck, and it was unbelievably heavy. I can’t imagine walking around with that kind of weight. As embarrassing as it was to ask, I had to have a picture with them seeing as this was a once in a lifetime chance.
The mild disappointment that I felt after the long neck village was made up 1000 fold with our next experience that same day…