Mahout for a day!

Having been there and done that, when I travel I really have to consider doing things other than the usual elephant show or posing with a long necked native. Maybe this time I went a little overboard, who knows. I signed up for a one day elephant trekking mahout training experience. What that means is I got picked up from the hotel, taken about an hour out of Chaing Mai and put in an elephant camp with a real mahout. The first thing he told me was to get up on the elephant and sit on its head. I am rather used to climbing a tall tower and gently lowering myself onto an elephant from about 10 feet high into a nice chair! Get up on the head? How do I do that pray tell?

You give the command in Thai to lift one

leg, which you stand on, then grab the top of the ear and a fatty part of the body and lift yourself up. Once there, you slide forward, take the poker stick and start giving commands and kicking in the appropriate spot that is, on the left side to go right and the right side to go left and then moving your body backwards to get the elephant to go backwards and so on. Somehow I survived that ordeal ( turning and standing in one spot) and was quite willing to walk down to the river beside the elephant to give him his bath. Unfortunately, the real mahout would not hear of it and he insisted on walking beside the elephant when I sat on the head and did my thing. It was a scary 10-15 minutes as I made my way down the path and engineered the elephant into the water where I proceeded to bath him before I took a raft down the river, or am I getting ahead of myself.

After the elephant ride, I took a bamboo raft down some river or other to a lunch spot, where I took a Thai cooking class…sure, this is now the area of fantasy. I did not take the Thai cooking class.

I had a long

week-end because Singapore celebrates every ethnic/religious day going and this was Depavali so Wednesday night I searched for a plane ticket out of Singapore and came up with Chiang Mai believe it or not. Having never been here before , I did the usual search thingy, found a hotel within the old city of Chaing Mai within the original walls and looked for an adventure. My area had a lot of travel guys suggesting this tour or other but I told them I wanted something different so they organized it all by telephone and I had a personal tour. The price was unbelievable, but this is Thailand remember. I did the Mahout training thing, a river rafting experience, lunch and then a visit to a local village for about $50 ( in a private car and tour leader who happened to be a mahout!)

To-day back to Singapore and school. We just finished a great Deepavali assembly Bollywood style and now have to prepare for the Moslem Haj production in about 2 weeks with November 11^th thrown in for good luck. Should be a busy two weeks before my next vacation.