Chiang Rai - Friday

We are really enjoying this far northern part of Thailand. The weather has been within a perfect range, with crisp mornings and cool evenings. Even at midday, it's very pleasant with sunburn only if hats are not worn. In the evening market, which is where we will be in an hour, summer evening clothes are sufficient or a light wrap.

I was sitting on my elephant this morning, in about 2-3 metres of river water, when my hat blew off. It was one I detested, being a horrible brown cotton thing that made me appear demented. Just at that moment, my bull elephant released a dozen coconut-sized spheres of dung. My mahout suddenly noticed my hat floating past us (we were moving slowly downstream) and called out. There was no hope the elephant would catch up to the hat, now looking more like dung in the water than the real thing, so he called out to Janet's elephant, about 30 metres ahead. "Mai pen rai!" I called out instinctively, "Don't worry. It's nothing." My mahout swung around and grinned, "Mai pen rai" and made it a question. "It's OK," I said in English. "It's OK." By then, thankfully, the hat had sunk. I would not have kept it anyway after it was by now indistinguishable from half a tonne of elephant droppings. But it did give me a reason to buy a 75-cent lovely straw hat, thus helping immeasurably the local economy.

Six huge pythons were in their cages at this up-river outpost-village this morning. they are a tourist attraction. Their skins are as exquisite as jewels, their bodies as thick as thighs. But they are deprived of all the sensation of sliding through the jungle because, being captured, they lie on linoleum inside wire-netting cages, curled up and never having their own kind to lie with or communicate. They move silently, slowly in these prisons, endlessly searching for escape. You could use the same argument for the elephants, an endangered species. They are either tethered or have the mahouts on their back riding them. At least they communicate as they jostle around each other, competing with long trunks for the 20 Baht bunches of bananas and sugar cane sticks tourists are urged to buy for them. It's a strange sensation to feed these sticks to an elephant while those behind curl their trunks around me all wanting to be fed. I had five elephants with their trunks trying to wrestle sugar cane sticks from my hands, all at once and very gently, but I had to fight the urge to holler for help.

The longboat we hired took about an hour to reach the village. It's a speedboat built on traditional shallow-draft lines but powered by an LPG-driven small car motor engine and a long drive-shaft that zooms it along at a speedboat velocity. The owner waited while we did the elephant thing, including our half-hour ride and the river walk on the way back, then the shorter ride back as we were with the current. I had vowed never to have another elephant ride after the tortuous experience of seeing old elephants at Chiang Mai painfully climb a 30 degree slope. In metre-deep mud, their lumbering, puffing, relentless plodding, depressed me for such a long time.

But at this village, the elephants walked on paved roads with virtually no slope and the promise of a walk in the river on the way back. But I guess that doesn't remove the guilt of exploiting such a huge, sensitive animal. It's confusing.

Now, Janet wants to go to the night market to buy a few presents for her grandchildren. We are overloaded with weight problems at each airport so the metre-long wooden marionette horses just may get a miss.