Day 81 Mahout

24/05/13
I was collected at 08.30 and as I climbed into the back of a pickup I joined 7 other English people all of whom were currently travelling together but that didn't stop me being welcomed into their friendship circle. We stopped at a butterfly and orchid farm, it was a total waste of time as there was less than 20 butterflies (I know because I purposely searched the whole enclosure and only counted 12) and most the orchids looked dead. When we arrived we were told a bit about elephants then got changed into some rags that vaguely resembled clothes. We proceeded to spend over an hour feeding the 3 elephants that they currently had there, they eat 200kg+ of food a day so eating takes up a large proportion of the day. Just before lunch we all had a brief bareback ride on one of the elephants, it was slightly unnerving being so high up on an animal you could barely control (even though we had been taught the commands). After lunch we paired up, I went with a big lad called Alex and we were given the only male, a huge beast that had a mind of its own. During the whole ride we were miles behind the others, mainly because our elephant couldn't manage to go 10m without stopping to eat (typical male). We journeyed to a river where we slid off the elephants and were handed buckets so we could wash the elephants, it only took a couple of minutes for me to 'accidentally' miss the elephant and hit Alex with a bucket of water, naturally a water fight across the elephant's back ensued. It somehow managed to involve all 8 Englishmen (and women) and a number of the mahouts, even one or two of the elephants wanted to get involved. After a little while longer scrubbing we swapped positions on the elephant and rode back to camp. There was just time enough to feed more bananas to the elephants and have a shower before heading back to Chiang Mai. It was an awesome day with such a powerful, majestic animal!