Monday, June 17, 2013

MORE MONDULKIRI - ELEPHANTS!

Making friends with our elepants
Mr. Phuht's son and his two cousins who were visiting from the city picked us up and took us to Putang, the elephant village.  We were introduced to our mahouts (elephant jockeys) and our elephants, taking the opportunity to make friends before ascending the bamboo ladder onto the baskets on their backs. Sorry, elephants!




 Yes, Jeff was riding an elephant also, but since it's pretty hard to pass a camera back and forth from atop an elephant (and did I mention it was raining?) I had the camera for the first few hours.  I can't even begin to explain the experience of bumping along on an elephant's back through the jungle with no sound but the crunching of jungle vegetation below the elephants' feet, the chirp of the crickets, the splosh splosh splosh of the rain - until the mahout began to sing a gentle song to his elephant - that sounded oddly like a love song.

After a few hours of this - climbing up hill, down hill, waiting for our elephants as they stopped to munch on a tree - we stopped at a river that had a small waterfall for our picnic lunch.

Mr. Phuht's son and his cousins thought nothing of stripping down to his BVD's to jump off the waterfall.

 ... and after lunch we gave the elephants a bath!  How cool is this?




All I could think was, "IF this elephant rolls over......"


Scenes from atop an elephant:  





Because it was raining so frequently in Mondulkiri I don't have photos of a lot of things we did.  Mr. Phuht provided us with bicycles which we took all over the town and up and down some hills outside of town - getting pretty muddy in the rain!  The most interesting thing we saw was a giant volleyball tournament - must have been the regional playoffs with about a dozen courts having matches on them at the same time.
 The village itself was interesting and we had a few great dinners - both at Mr. Phuht's restaurant and another nearby that was a lovely place in an outdoor, tree shaded area (the trees came in handy in blocking the raindrops).  We also had a very questionable massage at a place that I think specializes on things other than Thai massage.... it was sketchy to say the least and Jeff was not that adept at fending off the younger masseuse's advances (which took place right next to where the older masseuse -or was she the madame?- was giving me something that weakly passed as a Thai massage).  

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