What a treat this morning proved to be! Trekking through the jungle on an elephant – not something I do every day.  We drove about 75 kilometres north of Chiang Mai to the Chiang Dao Elephant Training Centre.  About 2,000 elephants in Thailand are privately owned, and about 3,000 are under the control of the government.  Elephants are no longer used for work in Thailand, only for tourism which provides them with a pretty cushy life. Fees and donations go toward supporting the Centre and to protecting other elephants in Thailand.

In pairs we boarded (loaded onto? climbed upon? not-quite-leapt on?) elephants and spent the next 50 minutes trekking en masses along impossibly narrow jungle trails that were frightening uphill and alarmingly downhill at times.  The elepants are amazingly sure-footed, making tight turns without missing a beat.  The period in the river was the smoothest part of the ride the – river bottom must have been quite flat.  It really was great fun – adults at play!

Following our ride, our local guide Soupa who is from this area told us of growing up in a village where the main crop was opium, a crop that has now been officially banned.  Nowadays, agriculturalists are visiting these mountain villages to teach the farmers how to grow coffee or apples or some other healthy crop instead.

The Training Centre puts on a show for tourists every day.  The mahouts begin by bathing the elephants.  Apparently at night the elephants roll around in the dirt and small stones stick to their skin. Since the skin is quite sensitive, the mahouts cannot place saddles on them unless there is nothing beneath to irritate their hides.  The elephants appear to quite enjoy their baths, cooperating by turning this way and that so the mahout can do his job.

They then perform various feats of strength – pulling and pushing logs – and one very talented elephant paints a picture.  The mahout dips a brush in paint; the elephant then takes the brush and draws a tree trunk with branches and then flowers as the mahout provides brushes dipped in different coloured paint.  As a finishing touch to the drawing the mahout gives the elephant a brush of a size we would use to paint walls at home, and the elephant fills in grass and a border on the drawing.  I would be hard pressed to paint such a lovely picture!

We stopped at a roadside restaurant north of Chiang Mai for what proved to be one of the best meals we have had in Thailand.

A word about the food.  I haven’t been writing about food every day because it has all been so good there seemed to be little I could add to previous descriptions.  Today’s meal, however, was a cut above.  The venue was much plainer, but the Shan (northern Thai) cuisine was noticeably different from what we have so far eaten and a fair bit tastier too.

Road Scholar gave us the afternoon and evening off, so my tour-mate Linnea and I wandered around old Chiang Mai.  We visited Wat Chedi Luang which was built in mid-14th century and half destroyed in ann earthquake in 1545.  During that time the Wat was temporarily home to the Emerald Buddha.  Wat Chedi Luang has since been restored to some extent, but it is not known how high the original was. Still, what is left is massive.  A smaller temple on the same grounds caught my eye.  It’s not shiny which sets it apart from other wats, but is beautiful in its simplicity.  Wat Chedi Luang is adjacent to a university for monks; they look resplendent as they pass by in their bright orange and yellow robes!

I ended the day with a delicious yet inexpensive dinner at Just Khao Soi.  Khao Soi is a chicken curry soup with “flat, squiggly wheat noodles” (Lonely Planet Guide) and crispy noodles on top.  I guess you had to be there, ha ha!

Til tomorrow from Luang Prabang, Laos.