Elephants

Ben writes:
Hi. This is a quick one, as we are running out the door. Don't feel bad, our journals are equally neglected.

We spent a week at the Elephant Nature Park outside of Chiangmai. It's a place for elephants who are abused in the tourism or illegal logging industries. Unfortunately, that is all elephants in those industries. There is a lot to get into, but the short version is that to train elephants, it is believed that they have to be tortured, in a three day ritual called the pujong (phonetic spelling), to break their spirit first. After that, they are continually abused, basically using negative instead of positive reinforcement. A lot of the abuse stems from ignorance rather than deliberate cruelty, but that doesn't make the situation better for the elephants.

At the park, every elephant has a personal handler, a mahout. This is true of all elephants, but the ones at the park don't use sharp sticks and hitting, just tugs on the ear and yelling, when needed, which is often, as elephants are large and somewhat willful. One of the goals here is to show that elephants can be trained with positive reinforcement: three of the baby elephants who have not been through the pujong are on a positive reinforcement regime, with good but gradual results.

The park does not aim to have people boycott elephant tourism entirely, but to educate people, and change the industry. If you should go on an elephant trek, please ask to walk with the elephant, rather than ride it, as those baskets basically break their backs. One mahout on the neck or head suits their anatomy just fine, though. Go to www.elephantnaturefoundation.org for more information.

Our role in all of this was to be helpers and vacationers. There were about 15 other volunteers that week, some for the week, some having been there for a month already. Every day when the food truck came, we unloaded huge amounts of corn, pumpkins, watermelon, pineapples, cucumbers and such, cleaned it, chopped it, and put it in baskets for the elephants. Then we, and the day visitors, would feed the elephants a few bits at a time. You can see Jo feeding a baby above. The elephants are perfectly capable of feeding themselves, but they let us do it for fun, which it is. We also go in the river with them, and scrub them off every day, under the careful guidance of the mahouts. And twice a week, we removed the gooky layer of mud from their new mud pit, and then refill it with water, so it's only a little muddy -- elephants are apparently picky creatures. We get very muddy doing it, and then hop in the river, where we dodge floatin elephant poo.

Spending so much time up close with elephants was amazing -- they look much weirder than you think, and they definitely have personalities. On the last day, we saw two young boy elephants play with a soccer ball, and then stomp it, kick it once, and walk away. The young ones also sometimes like to charge at inexperienced volunteers for a laugh, though not while we were there. Oh, I also fed the really old elephant with no teeth, which involved putting the food right into her gummy mouth. Please take a minute to really imagine that.

We were also lucky in that we had a great group of co-volunteers. Canadians, Americans and Brits, as it happened. And there are about 35 dogs at the park, always ready to be patted and played with, or follow you if you go somewhere, or come back, or do anything. The dogs really made every minute even better than it should have been.

Since then, we took a long train ride down to Ayutthaya, where we saw some ruins, and then to Khao Yai National Park, where we hiked in the rain forest, got attacked by tiny leeches, and saw gibbons, hornbills, and porcupines in the wild. Now we are in the wonderful Bangkok apartment of Joanna's aunt's friend. We're taking a week for more national parks and island beaching, and then back here, and then... home. Well, California. And then home.

Wow, We Were in Laos! And Thailand Now.

Ben writes:

OK, dudes, we have been in an entire other country since we lasted posted an interweb weblog update post. We have actually three countries to mention here. So.

CHINA
Well, we did fly down to Xishuangbanna (enjoy pronouncing that), and spent a few days in the region. We went from being incredibly cold in Zhongdian to incredibly hot and humid in the city of Jinghong. Also, we thought we had seen polluted air in the bigger cities up north, but this was incredible. You could see it in the air around you. And it was the dry season, so there was a layer of dust on everything -- all the plants were coated in brown and grey. We don't know if it's always that way, or just in March. We may never know.

The city was nice enough, though, and we managed to get out and see a Chinese action film called Twins Mission, probably a sequel, in which the twin sister spies / circus acrobats are joined by like 3 sets of good twins to fight 3 sets of bad twins over some stolen artifact while the evil capitalist somehow blackmails the mother of a cancer kid named Happy (no translation, they call her "Happy") into giving up the artifact, which she apparently owns. The girls fight FIVE fake-looking CG snakes, the cancer child is dropped from a crane, there is a weird racist interlude (this kind of humor persists because there are very few black people around in China, which results in pretty basic ignorance -- for instance, there is a toothpaste called Darlie that used to be Darkie. Its logo is a black man in a top hat with shiny white teeth ), and it ends on a cliff-hanger. Awesome.

Also, we rented bikes for two days and took a 27k trip on the road along the Mekong River down to Ganlanba, a "village" that was actaully just a town. We kind of wandered around the night market as it concluded and then watched Chinese TV. The next day, we went back to the market, where there were baby chicks and puppies for sale!

Then we took our bikes on the very short ferry ride to an "actual" village across the river. It became quickly apparent, however, that we were basically treating a town as a tourist attraction. There was really nothing to see there but people with less money than us. In fact, Ganlanba has a "minority village" where you can pay to do exactly that. Speaking of racism again, China is generally not very respectful of its ethnic minorities.
So, that was really awkward and unpleasant, but a learning experience I guess. We got down to the river and swam in its freezing cold waters for a minute on the way back to Jinghong.
And then we spent two very long days riding buses to

LAOS
After crossing the border, which was easy enough, we just barely made all the necessary buses to get to the city of Luang Prabang on time for our 5-day hiking / kayaking excursion. This is where we finally met up with Ian again. In addition to Ian, our little group included Melzie and V, sisters and British, and Simon, the crazy Swedish guy whom we like a lot. Our two Laotian guides were Wontong and La (phonetic spellings there), who proved to be very fun guys.
Basically, each day we would eat breakfast, hike (or later, kayak) for a while, stop for lunch in a village in the woods or near the road, hike / kayak more, then have dinner and fun at the village where we'd sleep.

It is burning season in Laos, which we had no idea about. This meant that though much of the jungle was lush, green and beautiful, a lot of it was on fire or burned to make room for agriculture. Also, the air was filled with smoke, so we could not see too far. Nonetheless, it was great to be in the outdoors. Our first day the guides were guided by a young woman and a fleet-footed little boy from the village to a nearby cave, which we all explored together. Which is to say, they'd never seen it either, but helped us through by holding our hands and saying "be careful" a lot. This is why Laos is more fun than America. Similarly, on the third day, we got to climb in a waterfall, made possible by some rough plant life growing in it.

Staying at the villages was less awkward than our experience in China, as we were paying guests, but still strange. Walking around taking pictures the first day did not necessarily feel like the best choice. Kicking around an awesome woven wooden ball with some kids/young people did, though. It makes the hackey sack look very dumb in comparison. Yeah, I said it.

In the evenings, after we ate, the correct thing to do was to buy the local beer (Beerlao), and/or lao-lao, the local moonshine, or lao whiskey, which you drink out of long bamboo straws from a ceramic container, and is much sweeter than whiskey. This felt too indulgent at first, but there was not much else to do at night, and it generated income for the village. In some villages, no one was impressed about us, but in the ones farther from the roads, we would get an audience of people just kind of looking at us talking and drinking.

After the trek, we spent a few days in Luang Prabang, a relatively sleepy but pleasant town. We did less than we might have, as I spent one day basically vomiting the entire time. What got in there, we'll never know, but I got it out. I feel pretty recovered by now.
From LP, we took a speedboat for about 7 hours on the river, and then a bus, and then another bus, to get to

THAILAND
We are in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand's second biggest, but only a little more metropolitan feeling than Luang Prabang. The old city/downtown is contained within a square moat (now easily crossed), and marked by some remaining/restored sections of wall. We are in the midst of Songkran, the Buddhist New Year, celebrated here, in Laos, and elsewhere. A once very benign custom of sprinkling water on others to wash away the last year's sins has escalated into a daytime hours full-on street party of people riding in pick-up trucks throwing buckets of water out of a giants barrel onto the people on the sidewalk, who are doing basically the same thing. Some people are drunk. Around the moat, it is especially crazy.
Finding fun things to do at night has been frustrating/depressing (lame backpackers' bars, lascivious white men playing pool with Thai women, etc), but daytime is great. Yesterday we biked to the zoo, shooting our feeble water guns at everyone who watered the heck out of us. If you plan to go anywhere or do anything during Songkran, you plan to do it wet.













Today we emphatically joined the insanity, standing on the road across from the moat, drinking beer and dancing to (for example) Madonna remixes with all the friendly Thai people. Tomorrow we're off to a week of volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park, which is what is sounds like.