Why Did The Elephant Cross The Road?

Elephants are SOOOOOOOOOOOOO cool! I bet if they were in a ninja fight, they would win! Have you ever seen an elephant prodding stick? Those are worse than ninja stars! They are also useful for prodding your girlfriend/boyfriend, but truth be told, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would purposefully poke an elephant with a sharp stick. Seems like a less than smart move. And apparently they have good memories AND xray vision.

All kidding aside, our trip to the Elephant Nature Conservancy in Chiang Mai was great. We've been hanging out with a French Canadian, Olivier, and his Chinese girlfriend, Jess (so we were like mirror images) who we met on the bus ride up here. They motivated us to rent motorbikes and brave the 150km roundtrip ride to the park to spend a glorious day with the behemoth mammals. We got to see the tail end of the elephant show which reminded us of seaworld. They train these rehabilitated elephants to paint pictures of flowers, other elephants, abstract art, etc. It's disconcerting that elephants have better artistic abilities than we do.

The highlight of the day, which you can't really see from the pictures since it was impossible to get the angle right, was our elephant ride through the jungle. At one point, the elephant let out a monsterous growl and I thought we were done for.

We're both fighting a little stomach bug right now. How we managed to avoid it in India but get it in Thailand is a mystery to us. We were supposed to take a cooking class today but the thought of grounding curry paste was a bit nauseating, but we're going to try to fit it in tomorrow before we take off back to Bangkok on the 1st and then ship on out to China on the 3rd.