More fun in Chiang Mai - including elephants!

Northern Thailand certainly is not lacking for fun things to do. After the Tiger Kingdom and Zorbing the day before, we went zip lining! It was a huge zipline course in the jungle canopy that had 34 lines and some rope bridges, and two places where we were lowered down to a platform on a rope line. SOOOO much fun!

Our guides were really fun and hilarious They would pretend to not catch you at the end of the line, or catch you then fake drop you, they would shake the bridges and pull on the ziplines so you would bob up and down as you zipped across. And they would joke the entire time; one girl asked him how many more lines we had to do and he turned to her with a straight face and said "I don't know, this is my first day." 
What a jokester.

Looking like pirates ready to gear up

Here goes!

Coming in for a landing

 Our adventure was called Flight of the Gibbon because you fly through the trees like a gibbon monkey. We even got to see 3 of them!

Kind of hard to see, but there's a brown one down below the black one in the sunlight

One of the rickety bridges we had to walk across

One of the cool platforms with a spiral staircase

Wheeeee! Here I come!

 One of the lines was called the Superman/Spiderman. They would hook the cord to your back instead of the front so you were zipping down face first. Then when you landed, you had to grab a large net at the end and climb up to the platform. It was really fun, and much less scary than it sounds!

Brannan "Superman" Beasley coming down the line

And now he's Spiderman

At the first rappel point, where they lowered us down onto the next platform by a rope, the guides were fooling around of course. They would drop everyone really fast for a second and then catch the rope so the person would scream thinking they had been dropped. Such jokesters. Well, they did it to Brannan, and the other end of the rope got caught on the tree!  So he was left dangling there for a good 2 or 3 minutes while one of the guys monkeyed halfway up the tree to free the rope. My turn came next and needless to say, he lowered me nice and easy and boring. Some people have all the fun!

You can see the platform below us where we were lowered

Going down!

We had a great time soaring through the tops of the trees like monkeys. We were so high, we rarely saw the ground below, just the tops of more trees!

After zip lining, they fed us lunch and then drove us down the road to see a waterfall. It appeared that the local monastery was on field trip because there were monks everywhere, even some guiding tours of other monks. So we hiked up a little ways to see it.

"And this here is a waterfall"
"Ooooh" click, click

It was hard to get a picture without any monks in it!

It was a long, fun day and everyone slept on the van ride home.

The next day we decided to take it a little easy and go visit some of the wats (temples) in town. Chiang Mai is a lot like the Layton/Kaysville, Utah area.  Except here there are Buddhist temples on every corner instead of LDS stake centers.
We went to see probably close to 10 wats  in a very short walking distance. They are all very similar, dragons at the entrance, gold or glittery glass on the front entrance, and a big Buddha inside.

Done and done

One wat took us by surprise by having wax figures of famous monks (we think) inside. They were so lifelike that everyone entered the wat and made a wide berth around the figures, looking at them out of the corners of their eyes to see if they were real or not. We did it too! It was a little unnerving.

This lady walked up and put her face right in the face of the monk to get a better look. That's when I was fairly sure they were wax figures.

Here's another one sitting with bronze busts... pretty sure it was wax too. Pretty sure.

The next day was Christmas Day! We had found some santa hats at a random street store that appeared to sell every banner or cheap decoration for Christmas and New Years. So of course we wore them all day when we set off to ride elephants!

Merry Christmas!

The Thai people thought the hats were great and would laugh and shout Merry Christmas to us when they saw us.

We booked an elephant training tour where they taught you how to feed the elephants, how to give them commands, how to ride them, and how to wash them. It was a lot of fun to get to learn all these things and be with the elephants all day instead of just an hour ride through the jungle (which you can also do). They also made us wear ridiculous clothes since we would be getting dirty.

Merry Christmas from prison

Our fun crew for the day: A family of French-speaking Swiss, 3 Scotsmen, 2 Argentinians, ourselves playing the part of the crazy Americans in Santa hats, and our guide Mr Bowie. And a partridge in a pear tree.

We got to ride the mama elephant, so the baby followed us around while we rode

 On the drive up, we stopped at a market to buy bananas or pineapples to feed the elephants. We bought some bananas and had a fun time feeding the baby.

More please!

Then it was time for our training session, where we would learn commands (in Thai) for the elephants. Brannan thought that it was pretty sad that elephants knew more Thai words than we did!
First we learned the words to tell them to put their leg up so we could climb up their leg onto their back, and we would say it again when we wanted to get off. Or you could give them a command to put their head down and you could jump up and over their head to get on, but only a couple people tried that!

Then we were able to give them some bananas and say "Yayaa" which means "no more fruit" when it was gone.

After that, we learned how to tell them to turn right, left, reverse, stop and go. We both got on at the same time, sang a round of Jingle Bells from atop our elephants, and then carried on with giving them the commands.

Turn left ... "Saai"

Turn right... "Kwaw"

 Stop was "yood", reverse was "toy" and go was "baai". The elephants were very smart and could understand our accents very well.
After that, we had some lunch before we went for our rides.

Christmas Dinner... God bless us, every one!

Then it was time for the rides! We led our elephants down to a mud pit to give them a mud bath. They are similar to pigs in many ways: they felt like pigs, very bristly and rough skin, and they love mud! It helps keep them cool and keeps the bugs off.

But pretty soon, the inevitable mud fight broke out. By the end, all the elephants were out of the mud pit and there were only dirty people left in there!

All the elephants gathered around thinking "Puh-lease. Grow up..."

 Then we were off again down to the river to rinse them off (and us).

The elephants loved the water. We had buckets and just threw water all over them. The baby was hilarious because the water was deep enough that he could lay down in it and be completely covered. He would lay down on his side and disappear, and stick his trunk out of the water, then flip over and swim circles with his nose out. So funny! He was rolling around with his feet sticking up out of the water and jumping out and diving back in. It was like watching an excited little puppy.

All clean! Mostly

Such a fun day! Brannan even got a kiss by one of the elephants. She would stick her trunk on your cheek and suction so it would kiss you. She had to be coaxed to kiss the other kids, the trainer had to pull her trunk over. But Brannan walked over and all of a sudden she was so eager! She planted a big wet one on him.

Coming in for a smooch!

We certainly had a memorable Christmas! One that will be hard to top, I'm sure. 

Merry Christmas!