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That “traditional” dinner thing I went to ended up being realllly cheesy. Tons of middle aged tourists there with cameras taking pictures of the not-so-impressive traditional Thai dancing. It was really funny at least, this Australian guy Andy and I had a great time laughing about the whole experience so I certainly don’t regret it.

Let me quickly preface talking about yesterday by saying I didn’t really consider the ethics of any of it until after I had told everybody here I was going and paid. Thailand has 2000 wild elephants, and 2000 elephants in captivity but I asked Pong, one of the Thai people here, what he thought about the ethics of using elephants for entertainment and he said it was much better than what they would do with these captive elephants otherwise by locking them up in Zoos or forcing them to help log forests. With that said it’s clearly better to let these wild animals be wild running around in the forest and I feel bad for having supported all of this… but damn it’s really hard to pass up riding an elephant.

Yesterday we drove to an “elephant camp” and saw a ridiculously touristy little elephant show where they had trained the elephants to do all sorts of things I didn’t think elephants had the capacity to do. They could do really strange dances, play soccer, paint (surprisingly well), and lots of other small things. I didn’t except to enjoy it as much as I did but it was actually pretty crazy.

After that we drove for a long, long time deeper into the forest until we came to a much less populated elephant camp where the elephants seemed to have a lot of space to enjoy. Then, well, we rode elephants for about an hour through a really beautiful mountain valley down into a waterfall where our elephants played in the water and splashed each other with their trunks. It was really insane, as you might expect riding an elephant is. Liability is nothing in Thailand so they let me and Andy ride on the head/neck of the elephant like the trainers do. It was a rough ride but it was reallllly a lot of fun.

After that we drove even higher and farther in the mountains where Pong showed us some “hill tribe people.” That sounds kind of ridiculous but it turned out of be remarkably authentic. They lived in the mountains in dirty little shack villages with lots of farm animals and crop land. Pong mentioned something about “traditional pig sacrifices” as they are a symbol of evil when we saw them in their poorly constructed wooden board pig pen. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of the villagers as they aren’t too excited about being on the opposite end of a camera but we went and gave candy to all the kids at the kindergarten class who were happy to be in pictures, especially when I would show it to them on the screen afterwards.

*I gotta go so I’m writing a little filler here to remember to write more later*

After that we went to a hot springs in a valley.

Late last night a group of us hostel folk went to a popular Thai club/bar.