So as promised, I went to Chiang Mai (again). This time was short and sweet, but good nonetheless. Our first day we spent at Baan Chang Elephant Park, which is funny because "baan" means house in Thai and "chang" means elephant. But it was a wonderful, unforgettable experience. The park has rescued 21 elephants, and has two babies (born from rescued elephants). The dedicate their money to expanding the park, rescuing elephants, and food/medicine/etc. Each elephant has a "mahout," which the elephant picks itself which I thought was pretty cool. We start out with getting a general explanation of how the park runs, and then we get to feed the elephants bananas and sugarcane, which they love.
We then learned how to command the elephants to kneel, and how to climb on them properly.
Anddd then how to ride them, turning left and right, and of course stop. We then headed on at "hike" through the jungle on our elephants, MK and I sharing and elephant. After our hike we rode them to a pond and "swam" AKA bathed the elephants! They love the water almost as much as they love food. They even let us climb on top of them to take pictures (IE: pictures below)
We ended the night with a visit to a night market, where you can buy anything from a toboggan to a soap carving!
12/11/12--
After spending a full day researching algae to finish up our capstone, we woke up and went to Wat Umong, or the Tunnel Temple. Picking a random path upon arrival we stumbled upon the main entrance of the three tunnels, each leading to a central vein that eventually lead out to the top of the tunnels, where there was a large stupa.
After meeting Ty for some khao soy (mentioned in previous Chiang Mai post), we went back to the hostel to clean up and go to dinner at the Riverside restaurant!
We left the next day to head to Railay, a gorgeous beach near Krabi!
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