The city of Kanchanaburi is quite small and when planning on cities to visit in Thailand it wouldn't appear as anything special. There aren't any great temples, there are no beaches near by, and the night life is kind of a snooze. However, this seemingly dreary little city holds a special allure...animals. You can play with a tiger, hug a giraffe, or take a bath with an elephant. If you have ever met Kayla then you will understand that passing this place up was not an option.
Even though the whole hug a giraffe thing seemed really cool, we decided to narrow it down to 2 special animal attractions since we have a schedule, and more importantly a budget to stick to. So one early morning we loaded onto a bus (with AC) and started our journey to the elephant sanctuary. The elephant adventure had 2 parts: trekking and bathing. Kayla and I were the only 2 people that decided to do the elephant bathing, everyone else was either travelling with smaller children or were terrified of the idea of being on an elephant, let along the idea of being on one in a river. We had a very energetic tour guide that could speak fairly good English. He insured us that we were all going to have a very good time but that there were a few things that we needed to remember: 1.Listen to the elephant trainers instructions, 2. Stay in the seat with the metal "seat belt" fastened and 3. do not sit on the elephants neck. He was very adamant about rules number 2 and 3 because he said that if you were not careful that you would fall off and break something, or get stepped on by the elephant. Kayla and I were completely content following the rules....until following rule #1 meant breaking rule #2 and #3. Our elephant trainer (there was one elephant and trainer for every 2 people) after about 2 seconds down the path just jumped right off our elephants neck. He then told us in very broken English to unhook our "seat belt" and climb onto the neck one at a time....while the elephant was still walking along. Kayla and I looked at each other, had about a 1 second "should we?" look and then unhooked the belt. There is no way that while in Thailand if someone offers a Redwine girl the chance to ride on the elephants neck that we would say no. So Kayla held the bar and I wiggled forward. It seemed like I was made for this elephant. My legs fit perfectly behind the ears and aside from the fact that I was a little worried that our guide would ban us from any future excursions, I was thrilled! It was amazing to be pretty much sitting on an elephants head while it walked through the jungle. Granted our elephant was a little ADD, and our trainer was walking WAY ahead of us singing at the top of his lungs, but we stayed pretty much on track despite some random off path moments. After awhile the trainer found us and told us that we could switch, it was Kayla's turn. While trying to switch, which meant squirming past each other with nothing but each other to hold onto our trainer just roared with laughter and screamed "oh my god! oh my god!" Yes, he thought that the American girls were quite funny. It only took a few moments to realize that putting Kayla "in charge" of an elephant wasn't the best idea. First of all, her legs were WAY too long, she couldn't simply curl them up behind the elephants ears, which meant that she did not have very good balance. Second, what do you get when you put an ADD girl on an ADD elephant? Lost. And finally, it seemed that if we weren't lost than we weren't moving. We tried "Mush" and "go" and "ahoooyahhnaa" and the elephant would not move. Finally our trainer found us, laughed again, and said "oh come on," and we were on our way again. At the end of the trek we had to stop at this elevated platform to get off. As we approached, with Kayla still sitting on the neck, we saw the guide waiting on the platform. Kayla started panicking and I started laughing. I knew I had broken the rules too but there is something really funny about knowing your sister is going to get busted. There wasn't really anything the guy could do after all....our trainer told us to do it and that meant that we followed rule #1. If it was the first rule then it had to be the most important rule. Right? In the end he only smiled and shook his head. I think he knew that getting us to play it safe would be like telling that elephant to fly.
After the jungle trekking came the part we were most excited about....bathing elephants. While everyone else in our group was led off to try bamboo rafting Kayla and I hopped on another elephant and took off down to the river. We tried to explain that we were both good swimmers and that we didn't need a life jacket in water that barely went past Kayla's waist (we didn't point out that I couldn't touch in some points.) We figured that since they just let us ride on the elephants neck when we weren't supposed to that they wouldn't have an issue with us taking off the jackets. Wrong, "Safety first!" they said. We couldn't really brood over the jackets because as soon as the elephant was all the way in the water she started blasting us with water. We thought that she would spray a little water and that it would be like it was raining. Instead, she spit (sneezed, blew, whatever) the water out of her trunk at like a million miles an hour. It hit Kayla like a ton of bricks. Good thing I had my "big" sister there to take the first flew blows! After a few goes the elephant sunk down in the water and then shook us back and forth as hard as she could so that we would fly off her back. Then we took turns climbing up her back and getting doused. It was so much fun. This was definitely an experience that we could not have had back home in the states. Call us irresponsible, tell us to grow up, whatever you want but this was a once in a lifetime experience that we wouldn't trade for any desk job in the world.
Here are some photos from the day:
We are having problems uplaoding the videos so we will try again when we have a better internet connection!
