Have Trunk, Will Travel

After our tiger experience, we put some research into finding a suitable elephant experience. We discovered the Thai Elephant Conservation Center outside of town. Many reviewers who went there had it arranged by a tour guide service, but not us!

We hopped on a, um, vibrant bus and told the ticket seller, the driver, and about three other levels of translators where we wanted to get off. As the movie Jack the Giant Killer blared in Thai, we embarked on one of the craziest rides I’ve ever been on. The driver didn’t slow down for high grade hills, up or down, especially on some almost-hairpin turns. We felt every sway of the bus, as it was a double decker – seats on top, luggage on bottom. Then suddenly, we just stopped on the side of the highway and the attendant motioned to us – and only us – to get out.

it was like being inside a mariachi band — this is how I imagine Charo’s tour bus

There was nobody around as we headed up a dirt road, and very few people when we got to the parking/ticket/vendor area of the center. We paid and got on the shuttle with a couple of other people, and were dropped off at the elephant rides.

I was so excited! See, when I was younger I was a huge chicken about stuff and chose to watch from a safe distance as my little brother and mom rode an elephant at the fair one year. Finally, a chance to redeem myself.

We hopped on an elephant and he immediately went in for a dip in a pond. it was actually kind of deep and slightly alarming, as we were rocking around on an off-balance chair and the water came right up to the elephant’s eyeballs. Then we walked across the pool and up, up into the jungle! There was family on an elephant in front of us, but the jungle was so dense that we couldn’t even tell they were there most of the time. Other than that, almost nobody else around.

Our elephant, Pa Chi Da, was 20 years old and very particular – she would rather step off the trail and walk on a slope than step anywhere near another elephant’s poop. Our mahout (elephant handler) was very nice and seemed to really care about Pa Chi Da. He would keep the flies off of her and scratch itches a tree trunk rub wouldn’t satisfy. We lumbered past the nursery, where a month old elephant was hanging out with it’s mother. It was so rad.

Then we hopped on the shuttle for a bit, rode around the grounds in a loop and then stopped for the elephant bathing and show. Before the show, all the elephants take a moment to cool down and are washed by their mahouts in the pond where we started our ride. It was fun to watch them playing in the water and you could also buy sugar cane to feed them. The show is a chance for elephants to display their logging skills (their primary purpose) and other tricks. We saw elephants curtsy, throw balls in baskets and even watched three paint pictures. These elephants paint better than I ever could!

Next we tried to see the royal white elephants, because the royal elephant stables were in the center somewhere. Unfortunately we were told that those were not open to the public. Then we wandered down to the nursery to see the baby elephant up close – and it was even cuter! Just like Dumbo, but with this wiry hair standing on end all over. Then we walked to the hospital, where one elephant with a lame foot was chilling. Unfortunately elephants stepping on un-detonated mines is a big problem in this area.

To get back to Chiang Mai, we had to cross a large highway and then flag a bus down. It took almost forty minutes until a bus stopped, and when we got on it was standing room only. We stopped a couple times and eventually procured Mom a seat after somebody got off, but I stood for the entire hour it took us to get back.

From the bus station, we had a tuk-tuk driver take us to the night bazaar. It started raining, and we had a long day, so after searching for a well-reviewed restaurant for about an hour we gave up and chose a random (but covered!) sea food place. It was pretty good! We both really like the pineapple fried rice. Mom had fish and I had lanna sausage – a little too hot for me! We bopped around the night bazaar some, but it had been raining all day and people were still setting everything up when we decided to call it a night.

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I like to think that some Buddhist thought this was their great auntie reincarnated & decided to doll her up a bit.

We Out-Bizarre Foods the Bizarre Foods Guy

At seven am we hit an appointment market near Koi and Cotton’s house. They had everything there. Clothes for your traditional and modern needs. Shoes. Fruit. Soup. Live turtles in baskets. French fries. DVDs. Vegetables. Beats by Dre. Live fish flopping around. Candy. Sweets. Crepes. Diapers. Fermented fish. A baby elephant. People everywhere. It was nuts.

Yes, I said baby elephant.

i think the term ‘fire ant eggs’ was mentioned, (top left corner) – although i’m not certain

We wondered through several aisles of stalls and carts in front of a temple, asking questions about Thai fruit that we had never seen, or surprise treats wrapped in banana leaves. We tasted some green candy/jello stuff, some tiny grilled balls of coconut-y goodness (I have been on a search for them ever since, haven’t been able to find them yet!), some skewered things – and we bought much more for breakfast.

We stopped to feed a baby elephant, which I had some qualms about. You aren’t supposed to encourage this sort of behavior and it feeds into a vicious cycle of possible abuse or poverty-driven neglect. But when you are standing next to a baby elephant, with somebody telling you this is how these teenage boys make money to feed the elephant and themselves, it’s hard to say no.

After the elephant, we moved on to durian.

http://youtu.be/-o_1qillkJs?t=2m38s

(Skip to 2:38 for durian-specifics, although I’ve tried fish maw soup and horseshoe crab roe salad, and now kind of think Andrew Zimmern might be a wuss.)

As we were waiting in line for the vendor (a little old lady with two oven mitts on one hand to handle the prickly fruit), I thought to myself – this doesn’t smell so bad. As we stood there a little longer, a terrible smell gradually took over. “A-ha! I get it now,” I thought. Just as I began to inwardly hype myself up to taste this famed smelly fruit, Cotton told us he wanted to show us something Thai people really liked that he just could not develop a taste for in all his years in Thailand. We turned around and walked a few feet, and there was a vendor selling fermented fish.

Durian doesn’t have anything but a mildly fruity smell, y’all. Twelve buckets of various blends of rotting fish three feet behind you, however, does. Thai people use it for seasoning, and Cotton and Koi keep a bucket of it in their kitchen. I just can’t. Durian, however, tastes pretty good. It’s kind of a weird texture, but it smells fine.

Some fruit, soups, curries, sticky rice and fried pork were on the breakfast menu that morning. People in Asia don’t really seem to differentiate breakfast food from other food, so even though the pork soup or noodles with beef sounds good for lunch or dinner, it simply doesn’t appeal to me at eight am. Maybe that’s just me? I did get down on some fried pork.

We headed back to Bangkok after breakfast, stopping along the way to check out a Tesco Lotus – the Thai version of a super Target, just to see what’s going on. Generally, Thai people prefer the fresh market, but you could get some imported stuff – cheese! most importantly to Cotton. Asian people don’t really eat cheese (except, of course, royal cheese). I hadn’t noticed it before, but since then I have not seen anything with cheese that wasn’t Western food.

We went back to the Bourbon Street Hotel, got checked back in and resettled. “Who feels like a rub?” Cotton asked, as he explained that he and Koi haven’t really found a place they like out near where they live. So we went down the street, to the same massage place as earlier that week. This time we opted for the two hour Thai massage. Having barely conquered the pants last time, I did some asking around and was feeling confident in my ability to dress myself. Which is great, except this time my pants didn’t have drawstrings. I just pulled them on and laid down, and it worked out fine. Until I got up to use the restroom (gotta release those toxins somehow!) and my pants fell down. The masseuses closest to me and I all started giggling, and I’m sure we disrupted a few relaxed people. Eh, what are you gonna do?

The massage was intense, and I seriously thought about tapping out at one point (I was on my stomach, she was crouching on the back of my thighs, pressing her knees into my lower back and hands full force into my shoulder blades), but I figured I must have needed it. Besides, by the time I thought all that through, it was over and I was alive. My mom and I both felt awesome the next day, although both of us had a few more bruises to show for it.

After our massages, we went to eat at a delicious little Italian restaurant that Koi and Cotton like to get their foie gras fix when they’re in Bangkok (ah I’ve been missing you, carbs!). After some joking, wait, are you serious, I’m serious if you’re serious discussion, we decided to return to the massage place next to our hotel (yes, the one we just left) and all get another one hour foot massage. I didn’t realize reflexology was a part of a Thai foot massage, so I was very confused when she started poking the bottoms of my feet with a stick. For massage newbies: foot massages also included your calves, arms, shoulders, neck and head. Quite nice for a fraction of the price of a traditional massage.

So far, I am thinking there is no such thing as too much massage – especially when they come this cheap! Judge me if you want, but I hope the other countries we are visiting have a vibrant (and not-sketchy) massage culture. :)

Trip Massage Total: 4 hours

Tigers – Are They That Grrrrrreat?

Nothing like popcorn and bananas to start the day off right.

We had to be at the older, smaller train station at seven – apparently a peak traffic time in the city. Our taxi driver conferred with our hotel receptionist, who tried to confer with us but once again there was some linguistic confusion. We were a little concerned but we made it to the train station with a few minutes to spare.

There is a market right next to the station, so we thought we’d do a super quick reconnaissance in search of breakfast food – which is how we ended up with a bunch of mini-bananas and a bag of the most delicious kettle corn I’ve ever had (and I am what you might call a kettle corn connoisseur). We grabbed a Coke and hopped on the train to Kanchanaburi. We also rounded out our morning meal with some slices of pomelo that a vendor who had hopped on the train for a few stops sold us. It was served with this sugar/salt mixture that was pink and tasty.

After an unceremonious four hour train ride on the Death Railway, we took a five minute songthaew ride to our hotel (which was unbelievably nice for $25/night!). After we got checked in, we arranged to visit the tiger monastery. This involved a change in clothes (apparently reds, pinks, oranges and bright colors bother the tigers) and a 60 or so km ride down an almost-highway in the back of another songthaew, which is basically two covered benches in the bed of a pickup.

“Do you think this will annoy any tigers?” was never a serious question I’ve had about any of my outfit choices before today.

We got down in the canyon on temple grounds. On one side of a fence there were about ten or so tigers, each with a handler-type person, a couple monks hanging out, and a ton of people in lines on the other side. You could pay extra to take a group photo, where you got to hold the biggest tiger’s head in your lap, but we opted for the individual photos included in admission costs. You go in the fence one by one and hand your camera to somebody, and they hold your hand and walk you from tiger to tiger, telling you when and how to pose. For some reason, I actually had two handlers – an older lady who had no interest in making small talk led me around while a disinterested young lady took my pictures and chatted with my hand holder in Thai.

Being that close to tigers was amazing. They are awesome, in the truest sense of the word. I was in awe of their size and power but also their laziness and indifference. Sooo, pretty much like the rest of the cats I’ve encountered. One of the workers told us that big cats have the same sleeping habits in the wild as house cats do at home – 16 to 20 hours a day spent napping. When I tried to pet one of the tigers, it must have thought I was a fly because it tried to shoo me with it’s tail. The same thing happened to my mom, and they just told her to pet the tigers more firmly. We both got done and I flipped through my pics as soon as I got out of the gate…

My photographer cut my face off in all but one of the thirty pics she took. Seriously.

Mom’s turned out much better.

I was disappointed, but still glad to have the memory of hanging out with some tigers. My mom suggested I ask if I could go again – the worst they could say is no. The line was huge and they were pulling the plug on the photo op soon, since it was almost play time. I told the worker I had an “it can’t hurts to ask question,” and showed him the pics. He got me right to the front of the line and let me go through the whole thing again, which was awesome.

I felt like I shouldn't have been hovering in their peripherals .... — I wouldn’t have gotten so cozy if I had known he was licking his lips!

I have mixed feelings about this experience. Because it was a monastery, I thought it would be more about the relationships between the tigers and the monks. It turned out to be little more than a tourist attraction that the monks used to earn money. We heard both that the tigers were drugged and were not, but their lethargic behavior made sense when they were compared to domesticated cats for us by an employee. I am going to go with sober tigers, just hanging out in the hottest part of the day. It was also a little sad to see them shackled to the ground. (Even though a tiny part of me was glad they were chained up when I was in there with them.) Honestly, it felt kind of like a photo-op to cross off a list but I will say I’ve never had the opportunity to get that close to tigers anywhere else – see what I mean? Mixed feelings.

That evening, we had the hotel call a taxi for us – which happened to be a moto-taxi! Basically a motorcycle with bench for a sidecar. Not for the faint-hearted.

He took us to check out the bridge on the river Kwai, where we also stopped for some coconut milk ice cream with ‘thai sweet’ on top. It looked like shredded cheese, but it was just sugar. The ice cream was awesome!

wait, has anybody ever actually tried shredded cheese on ice cream?

Next we hit the night market. We wandered around trying to make some supper decisions, but couldn’t make up our minds. One obstacle we face is that my mom can’t have gluten/wheat and there are really no universal hand motions for that sort of thing (yet!). Finally we saw some tables under an awning set up on the sidewalk with a sign boasting a buffet of 9.99 Thai Baht (about $3). There was all this uncooked food setting out, and people were loading up plates and taking them back to their table, where a waiter set up a hot pot type thing. It had a fire underneath, a hot water moat and a hot metal dome.

Our server motioned for us to throw our meat on the dome and add vegetables and other stuff to the water to make soup. I’m not even sure what we ate! It was a fun adventure, we were laughing and trying to guess what we were eating (and if it was thoroughly cooked!).

Although it turns out I liked the bacon the best.

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