Elephant Show

Today Kate and I went on an adventure to see "authentic Thai things" which were less than authentic, but proved to be adventurous! It all started when the wrong driver picked us up at our guesthouse...

1. The wrong driver picked us up, even though we showed him our receipt which should have shown him that we were in fact NOT from his group!

2. We drove to the orchid and butterfly farm. It was rather ho-hum, however the drivers all seem to stop there so the tourists can look at something pretty while they e-mail our official info into an insurance company in case we break a leg falling off of an elephant, drown, or get into a car accident.

3. We drove to a Karen village - The Karen are from surrounding countries and due to continuous fighting, they have been pushed into Thailand. They are famous for being the "long neck" people. This particular group, however, has been transplanted from the "hills" to a small area close to Chiang Mai for the pleasure of tourists. The thing is, they get to keep refugee status and make some money by being transplanted, but we didn't know ahead of time that it would be like this, so it was a bit odd.

(While my blog includes mostly pictures of Kate since I take pictures of her, you can go to the "Kate's Travel Blog" to see pictures of me for the same reason!)

4. After the Karen village, we found out we were with the wrong group, and from then on, we were constantly trying to figure out where we were supposed to be. Our next adventure was riding elephants. Again, kind of odd...since we opted for a one-day tour, rather than overnight in the jungle, we didn't get to ride elephants in the jungle, but on a road...somehow it lost a bit of magic, but we snuck over to the elephants later on and petted them and found out that their trunks are REALLY strong, one wrapped it's trunk around my waist and also one tried to grab Kate's arm and it really hurt!

5. We had a mediocre buffet lunch of traditional Thai food which unfortunately didn't include curry or pad thai. After this the rest of our group left...we were told to go on an ox-cart ride to see another tribe while we waited for our actual group. Here's the thing - an ox cart ride is exactly what it sounds like. We got in a wooden cart pulled by a yoke of oxen, and rode for about 400meters, and then got out. We were again paraded by a set of stalls where hill-tribe women (some other indistinctive tribe) who wanted to sell us stuff. This was too bad, because we would have loved to hear about their culture and way of life, and not just by crappy souveniors from them.

6. We waited for a while longer, and then watched the elephant show - it was cool how many things the elephants could do, but it was sad that the trainers had to poke them with sharp things in the process. Kind of like seeing whales in tanks at aquariums - you know that it just isn't as good of a life as the open sea/jungle.

7. We hopped on a bamboo raft just as it started raining, and donned our purple ponchos. We loved this part, because it was so nice to be on the water. It was pretty going through the jungle, and we stayed relatively dry which was better than most of the people on the boat.

Overall, we saw some neat things on the trip. It was a bit too touristy to seem real, but it was better than not seeing it at all. Our next adventures include a thai cooking class and a jewelry making class!