Thailand

Thailand

... Now with 50% more 80's music... 

After what was probably the most annoying airport stay ever we arrived In Bangkok sleepy, annoyed and hungry for noodles.  It was with this fire in our hearts that we descended upon our hostel and had a nap. Durring our time in Thailand we had 2 stays in Bangkok our first was fortuitously “One night in Bangkok allowing me to play bad 80’s music. Our second was 2 nights making the 80’s music less appropriate.

Our first trip in and around Bangkok was spent mostly looking for food. For some reason we had a remarkably hard time with this. Our wanderings led us eventually to the flower market where I witnessed some of the most spectacular flower based structures ever. There was block after block of beautiful and wonderfully underpriced flowers in all sorts of configurations. It was here in this vast array of flowers that we found food finally. Street food for me and for the first time since we left home western fast food for Erin, on the basis that any pot containing several duck carcases was probably not vegetarian.  It was later this evening that Erin and I took our first Tuk Tuk ride. For those of you unfamiliar with a tuk tuk, it is for the most part a motorcycle front with a covered bench seat in the back.  It is a very interesting mode of transport. In some ways it is seen as a bit of a touristy thing and in some places you will be charged more for the hair raising privilege. It is not that the vehicles themselves are inherently unsafe it is just that you end up with a lot less vehicle between you and the rest of the traffic. This makes it somewhat nerve racking given the way these people drive.  Despite some interesting run ins with getting lost, walking down sketchy roads and driving past really creepy human looking monk statues we made it back safely and went to bed excited for the next 2 elephant filled weeks.

The elephant volunteer project was an interesting overall very fun experience. As some of you may know I approach the subject of elephants with a certain amount of caution having had somewhat of a run in with one in Africa some years ago.  For the most part the elephants here were very gentle. The exception being one young male who after being forced to dance to beg for food from tourists has developed a tendency to throw rocks at people. He is not nice and will smack you with his trunk if he can.  I cant say I blame him to be fair most people would throw rocks if treated the same way. A lot of our elephants had heartbreaking stories that I might not go into detail about. The general overview is this. Elephants are wild animals. They don’t just let you ride them. They don’t just dance on the street for fun. They don’t like to work in logging camps. In order to get an elephant to do these things they are taken away from their mothers as infants and tortured for days until their spirits are broken and they can start being trained. Paying for elephant rides, to see their tricks, or feeding them in the streets tells these people that you support this treatment and want these practices to continue.  Instead, we paid to enter the national park and see elephants in the wild as they should be, afraid of humans not mad at them.

When it comes to working with elephants it is important to remember that elephants are big and they eat a lot. So this brings us to the dilemma of. What do you feed 6 elephants every day. The answer is banana trees. One could summarize working with elephants by saying you are basically moving banana trees from one place to another.  In an average day one elephant will eat 8 to 12 banana trees. Yes 8 to 12. Now for the most part elephants are picky so this means they do not eat all of a banana tree. They eat the leaves and love the really leafy part but for the most part will not eat the stock in the center. Opting instead to stand on part of it and slide their trunk up the centre to gather up the good bits. The food is then generally played with and smacked across their shins for what I have been told is to soften it so they can eat it and but I suspect it is just cuz they like to play with their food and really, who is going to tell an elephant not to? When it comes to the trunk of a banana tree we cut them up into elephant bite sized pieces. If you have never seen a banana tree it is structurally similar to a cinimon bun. You have a really sweet juicy part in the middle followed by a slightly less juicy bit just around that and so forth till you get to the crunchy outer layer that nobody really likes that much. Well if you are an elephant, particularly a very large very old elephant nobody is going to tell you to eat your crusts.  All the elephants prefer the center bit and some of the older ones will only eat the very center and a bit of the next few layers leaving for us a lot of banana tree to haul back out of the enclosure. Some of the elephants (particularly the one aptly nick named monster munch) will eat just about everything but the far outer layer.

Knowing now that an average elephant eats 10 ish trees a day and that we have some 6 elephants we need about 60 banana trees a day. This brings us to the banana tree harvest portion of our story. I would like to at this point note that banana trees are heavy and often frequented by large hairy spiders, ants and strange juices.  It is when you encounter these spiders and realize they are on something that is on you that you realize the trees are not to heavy to be thrown in terror.  The banana harvest starts out by getting into the back of a large ish truck with sides just high enough to sit comfortably against… well comfortably if you remember you are sitting in the bed of a truck.  Next you walk into a field full of trees that have already had the one crop of bananas they will produce in their life and you start hacking at them with a machete. And you stack the truck. I would like to point out that carrying a banana tree on your shoulder has some inherent risks in it. Most of these having to do with there being a lot of fluid in a banana tree that will flow onto you given half a chance. It is not pleasant.  Once you have filled the truck with banana trees it is time to go home. Since there are now banana trees in your spot you sit on top of the pile and try not to think about how perilous this is as you dodge low hanging branches on the ride home.  For the most part I found that it was possible to escape many of the branch related perils by lying down on the pile of trees. This has it’s own risks and makes it feel much more like you are going to fall off at any moment.

Now you may have gotten the idea that taking care of elephants is all banana based boredome.. see what I did there. If I recall English class correctly that was alliteration. Anyhow while it is true that much of elephant maintenance is banana tree based there are parts that are not. There is the washing of the elephants… picture a water fight with a house… yeah you get wet. There is also the swimming with the elephants where you are also likely to get wet. Every day we also get to try and make a toy that takes more than 5 minutes for an elephant to destroy… it is not easy to make a toy sturdy enough to withstand an elephant stomping on it for more than a few minutes to get the fruit out of it.

The elephant sanctuary was a very fun 2 weeks. We had a fantastic room mate who wrote a song about one of the elephants we had there. I highly recommend you watch the you tube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx7xNGUsk0) I would also like to note that I made good friends with a girl from Australia because she showed me her ass…

I suppose I should elaborate on that one. She was showing me a mosquito bite. But she had a fire spinning tattoo beside said bite. It was at this point we both realized we fire spin and went running back to our rooms to get poi and contact balls so we could play. It was really really nice to have somebody to play with even without fire.  In addition to the extra curricular activities at the center such as movie night and karaoke fun time we had the pleasure of being in Thailand for the kings birthday. The people here really love their king. So for the kings birthday we all wandered into the nearby town to go celebrate with them. And boy was it interesting. One would think. Hey town sponsored event. Government funding maybe… perhaps the local authorities would be involved in the event…

Well you would probably not be able to guess what the outcome was. There was the speeches and the monks giving prayers and blessings to the king. Annnnd then came the fire works. They did not have to go far to get to us. Probably 20m away behind the sound truck was where they were being launched from. There was not even a sound delay as they exploded over head. It was vaguely terrifying. Next on the list of unsafe fire activities was the paper lanterns. This could have been just a really neat adventure if not for the power lines. Yes power lines. Lots of them criss crossing over the crowd. Now some of you may see where this is going but for those of you who cant. Some of the flying lanterns got stuck in the power lines… but no worrys we’ve got a guy with a long stick to try and poke it out. Turns out the stick was not long enough so he got a stack of plastic chairs. Where was the fire department. Where was the ambulance… where was the guy with a longer stick. Eventually the lantern floated down on it’s own but not without first seriously considering burning through another of the power lines. And then started the big fountainish fire works right in the middle of the crowd of people… not 2m from said power lines. It was a night full of fun and fire related close encounters. Amazingly nobody got hurt and the monks packed up the sound truck and drove home.