The Old One

The elephant blew a hot gust of air up my face as he unmistakenly told me that he wanted the banana in my hand. I placed it in the tip of his trunk and he swung it down into his mouth. We repeated this routine until I ran out of bananas. He lumbered on up the path while I was swaying at precarious angles with every deliberate step.

Suddenly the elephant leaned his behind into the wall he was standing next to and started to sit down. The mahout sitting on his head right in front of me shouted in Thai and dug his long curvy metal spike into the animals trunk. It hit with a dull hard thud and the elephant slowly reversed the motion of his body and started to walk again. We turned a corner and started a plodding march up a semi-steep incline. I had to lean forward further to feel balanced.

He slapped his mottled elephant ears against his body, trying to fan himself. I was straddling his neck so my legs were in the middle of his ears and bulky body, enjoying his efforts at airconditioning. My double knotted tennis shoes became untied by the end of the walk after all that slapping.

Without warning the mahout sitting right in front of me slid straight down the elephants face and trunk like a child on the metallic slide at recess. He turned back to look up at me, chuckled to himself and turned back to light a cigarette.

I turned my eyes to inspect the animal. His gray skin was blanketed in brown chalky dust and black wiry hairs that would undoubtedly have itched my calves raw if the mahout hadn't the foresight to place a piece of burlap between me and the elephant. The skin itself was a cool heavy leather that had deep cracks running along with the wrinkles. I placed both my hands on the base of his head to steady myself. The act of balancing became much easier with the mahout on the ground, but the mahout's attention was often distracted and the elephant seemed to sense the exact moment when he would be able to turn off the path so he started towards a tree. He broke off an entire branch from the trunk and commenced to munch it. Finding too much twig and not enough leaf, he proceeded to pluck smaller segments from the end of the branches with the most leaves. It looked like he was holding a bouquet of leaves. A fly must have irritated his shoulder because all of a sudden this bouquet was flying at me, still in his grip. He slapped at his shoulder with the leaves and satisfied, promptly shoved them into his mouth, beginning to masticate. By this time the mahout had noticed his wandering charge and called us back to the path.

We continued on behind the caravan of three other elephants. We lumbered up to a dusty broken hut where a man sold us bags of bananas for 20 baht. Everyone immediately had to surrender all their bananas one by one to their transports until their bags were empty.

Snack break complete, we headed back to the tall huts (they're the same height as an elephants back) where we had loaded. While I was standing there earlier waiting to load, I saw my elephant approaching from a ways away. As he mozied on over to pick me up, the man on the platform waiting to help me jump on laughed and pointed underneath the elephant. The animals mottled gray and white fifth leg was hanging almost to the ground - missing the dust by mere inches as he swung on over to meet me.

Now, as we were making our way back to these huts, the three elephants leading us walked right up to the unloading zone no problem. Our old man decided that instead of waiting in line to be deboarded, he wanted a drink. He stepped over to a huge clay container of water, stuck his trunk in, and inhaled. The sound of a huge balloon inflating expanded around me, followed by a huge splashy exhale as he filled his mouth with the water from his trunk. He did this a few more times, and then the next time he sucked water in, I watched his trunk go up and around instead of down and under into his mouth. Oh boy. The water erupted from his trunk and soaked me and my two German companions riding on his back. Not cooled down enough yet, he sprayed each side two more times, extracting squeals and belly laughs from us each time. With the mahout gone, I was able to lay my chest down around his brow and wrap my arms around the sides of his head to give him, what felt like to me, a hug.

With his passengers very pleased and giddy, the old dude stuck his head against the unloading platform and allowed me to jump off. I watched the mahout jump back on and lead him away. I turned away down the platform steps feeling very grateful and absolutely tickled pink to just have ridden such a huge, old, mischevious elephant.

Food and Fun - the Thai language

I've had 7 days of language class and I love it. Learning a new language is so revealing of the culture and people. My teacher repeatedly says Thai people only care about food and fun, so the language doesn't have much complicated like tenses, conjugations, or masculine/feminine! Actually, when we ask questions about saying something in the future, does the object have to come after the noun, do you need to repeat the pronoun, she shakes her head at us and in a comical voice says "Think about Thai brain, me so simple". So it sounds easy huh? For the most part it is. The tricky thing is the tones. Thai has 5 tones and they are pretty damn important. If you pronounce the tone for "beautiful" wrong, you are telling someone they have bad luck. Even worse, if you pronounce "experience/done already" wrong, you are saying "the mans body part that women no have" as my teacher would say. The mix-up has happened to me already! I went into a restaurant right after class full of confidence built up by my teacher telling me I am a genius student and ordered kaaw soy, a local egg noodle specialty with slow simmered chicken legs. Instead, I was served white rice because I pronounced "soy" with a falling tone. Bummer.

These tones make spoken Thai quite obnoxious. Listening to women talk is like having squawking parrots trying to out-caw eachother. To get the tones right, I just pitch my voice as harshly irritating as possible. It's actually fun to learn - putting a sentence together is like trying to compose a song. I almost think I should get out sheet music and write notes on the score to follow with words below.

There are personal pronouns, but women don't use them when talking about themselves because it's too formal. Instead they use their name because it's cute to refer to yourself in the third person, or they don't use a pronoun at all. The he/she pronoun (kao) doesn't differentiate between male/female/ladyboy. Sex is not as important in this culture as age is. It's more important to know if someone is older or younger than to know gender. A common greeting is to ask "How old are you" to determine if you show respect or expect it.

The language is very playful and cute. Words are repeated not for emphasis (I like it very very much) but to make a phrase cute and fun. Instead of saying "I'm joking" when using the words, they'll say literally "speak play" - play talking! They really do love their food and fun! The teacher loves to ask us funny questions. "Did you watch beautiful girls dance last night?" "Did you drink whisky with ladyboys?" Just this morning, she asked my friend Robbie literally "When have you experienced to be a man?" which we could only guess meant "How long have you been a man". For us westerners who would usually consider some of these questions a bit invasive, especially in a classroom setting where not everyone knows eachother or anyone else's views and beliefs, it feels a bit awkward. But the teacher, a teeny 30-something beautiful Thai woman, finds these questions hilarious and she laughs so hard she bends over.

As in many languages English has been incorporated and there is a set of words that are a jumble of both languages, referred to as Tinglish. These are mostly English words with Thai accents such as - airport, whisky, chocolate, shopping - even the word for foreigner (farang) came from French foreigners calling themselves "francais" and the Thais pronounced it "fa rang set". So now it's used for any foreigner. Some of the Tinglish is pretty incomprehensible unless you've heard it pronounced that way before. The 7-11 is just called the "seven" but it's pronounced "say-when", and a tissue is called "teet-choo" so you've got to wrap your ears around different pronounciations.

It's really fun learning all these new words and sounds. My teacher says if you don't smile you won't get the pronounciation right and people won't understand you. Most of them don't understand me anyways, but the smile goes a long ways in getting people to help me out. I just didn't realize that the famous Thai smile was part of the language.

I Gave My Passport To a Stranger

I gave a stranger my passport. And then I gave him $20 to ensure it would come back to me. I guess this is a common practice here. Instead of going to the embassy yourself to get a visa, you can give your passport to a travel agency and they will take it there for you for a few extra dollars. The anxiety I suffered when it didn't come back at the time promised was interesting. I worried, panicked, fretted, imagined the worse, and cursed travel agents, deceitful people and Cambodia in general, but I also trusted that the company did everything in their power. This is how things can work here, and I need to be assured that I'm not being taken advantage of, I'm just another squirrel in the process. And if the man who took my passport says, Oh I'm sorry it will definately be here tomorrow morning, well, then I'll just have to wait till tomorrow and see it then. It was quite a lesson in accepting the system as it is and not how I want it to be. In the end, I have my passport in time to catch my bus, and a beautiful hologrammed Thai visa is shining up at me from page 19.

Cambodia

So I'm in Siem Reap, Cambodia right now, visiting the temples at Angkor Wat. I've vaguely heard of these famous temples before (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) but had no idea how sprawling and ancient they were. It's basically a whole county of walled cities and temples and each one can take 2 hours to walk through. Angkor Wat is the most well known one - right at the entrance. The "Rainbow Bridge" crosses a huge man-made moat and connects the underworld (our world outside of the temples) to the human world (inside the temples). My first day I had a guide and a tuk-tuk driver ( a cart on the back of a motorcycle - very exciting!) who took me on the mini-tour. ...The mini-tour was 7 hours... Each temple is at least 1 km away from the next so I really did need a driver. The second day I did the grand tour without a guide and it still took me ... 6 hours.. I didn't repeat any of the temples on the second day and there was still more to see when I was done! Pictured here is my favorite, Preah Khan. 800 years ago it was a city built for the King while he was rebuilding his regular temple that had been sacked by the Siamese. Preah Khan is like a fairy tale in a forest. The temple still has all its mystical splendor while being slowly consumed by jungle. I was expecting to run into Mowgli from the jungle book at every doorway. This temple was calmer, being on the grand tour and further away from the more easily accessible Angkor Wat. Robbie and I had a picnic of pineapple, dragonfruit, and milkfruit in the shade of a doorway at the entrance to this temple and it was all the serenity and connection to the past I was hoping for.

Evidence of the Khmer Rouge is everywhere. On my first night I attended a concert at a hospital in Siem Reap and watched a short film about the building of the hospital. They showed footage from when the Khmer Rouge were in control and inside the hospital you could hear rockets shooting off while the doctors tried to attend to emaciated children. The doctor giving the concert said that before Khmer Rouge there were 950 Cambodia doctors in the country, and after wards only 50. They killed anyone with an education so it has been hard for the country to move ahead without intellectuals.

The food in Cambodia hasn't been too impressive so far. It's not as spicy as the Thais and I miss that. Lok lak is a chicken dish with onions in a sweet red sauce that I was hoping had heat but alas, had none. Of course, it was served with rice. I also had a chicken porridge last night that was good but mono-flavored and not spicy... I miss Thailand!

Pub Street in Siem Reap is where all the tourists go for dinner and drinks. Beers are $.50 draft and there is a variety of western food such as burgers, pizzas and french fries available. I went there on my first night and had Cambodian barbeque which included chicken, beef, squid, snake, and crocodile. Everything was good even though the crocodile was quite tough, but I enjoyed it all.

My guesthouse is this wonderfully huge place right in town and I have my own bathroom (shared with Robbie of course) and shower (by shower, I mean shower head with cold water right above the toilet, so that if you want to shower, the toilet will be completely soaked. I guess you could go to the bathroom and take a shower at the same time if you wanted... hmm hadn't thought of that before). No air-con in the room, but frequent cold showers seem to have almost the same effect.

The next step is getting up to Chiang Mai in Thailand to start language classes on Feb 8th. I'm taking a beginners Thai 3-week language class and I'm really excited to get into a routine and am hoping that I'll walk away feeling more comfortable travelling by myself around the country.

You are welcome to check out my photos from the trip thus far on Picasa Web Albums. You can see them if you click here.

Thanks for reading, would love to hear from you all, and hope you are well!