Thai Times

I’ve been in Thailand for three days and I’ve already experienced three once-in-a-life-time events. I also feel like I’ve been here a lifetime. 

Event number one: Tiger Kingdom 

Chelsea, her mom Jennie, her aunt Sarah, and I went to the Tiger Kingdom in Chiang Mai. It’s like a zoo, but only for tigers: big tigers, medium tigers, small tigers, smallest tigers, sick tigers, feisty tigers, sleepy tigers...and a couple random parrots. The draw of the Tiger Kingdom is that you actually get to hang out with these grand cats. You go into their cages, lie down with them, rub their bellies, feed the babies, and take a million pictures as urged by the tiger attendants. We began our tiger experience with the biggest ones, which were about two years old. It was initially terrifying. This big Thai man told us to sit next to these cats nearly twice our size, and if we weren’t comfortable looking enough he would tell us to lie down with them. It was an experience so opposite from the United States. It was virtually rule free, which goes against every obediently raised bone in my body. There were a few guidelines, like don’t approach the tiger from its head, don’t use a flash on your camera, and don’t make loud or fast motions. But for the most part you just do what you want around these tigers--including wrapping the tiger’s tail around your neck. The best part of the day was lying with the itty-bitty baby tigers. They are like playful kittens, but also sleepy kittens. (Side note: this is why you can hang out with the tigers. They are pretty much constantly sleepy. They aren’t doped or anything, they’re just sleepy. These ones were also raised by humans, so they see people as one of their own). The attendant in the smallest tiger playpen was a jokester. He kept himself entertained throughout the day by messing with us farangs (white people). He started by telling us the tiger we were playing with was a liger (any Napoleon Dynamite fans out there?). Then when Sarah was petting it he said, “It’s a boy, you see--one furry ball. You can touch one furry ball. So smooth, touch furry ball!” As Sarah gently fondled the baby tiger the attendant man laughed and laughed. Despite being made out to be a fool, I can appreciate someone enjoying their job. 

Event number two: Flight of the Gibbons 

Gibbons are monkeys in the jungle and flying like them means zip-lining amongst their trees. The four of us partook in a four hour zip-lining excursion with our Thai instructors Home & Boat. Boat didn’t speak English very well, but Home was pretty good, so good that he was able to joke with us nearly the entire time. Home kicked off the day by including himself in our family and telling us we could call him Homie. He would say from the top of a zip-line platform, “Are you ready, my family?” We became tight with crazy Homie throughout the course. The zip-line course was so long that I lost track of how many platforms and lines we crossed. We zip-lined downward, then hiked up for a long time, saw some monkeys, and then zip-lined downward again for hours. Some lines were long, others were sort, during others Boat & Homie would say, “Look out for that tree” and then swing us on the line right next to it. The platforms that connected the lines were like tree houses--the best tree houses ever. If we weren’t zip-lining from one platform to the next, we were walking on Indiana Jones-like rope bridges. Unlike a rollercoaster where you wait all day and then the high lasts for a mere 30 seconds, this experience went on for hours and was thrilling every moment. 

Event number three: Elephant Training & Trekking

Speaking of moments that last forever, the next event was a three day elephant trek in the jungle of Lampang. Chelsea signed us four up for The Mahout Training School and the rest of us had no idea what we’d really gotten ourselves into. The experience began at 8:30am on Sunday, October 21st. We were given Mahout suits to dress ourselves in for the next three days. Mahouts are the elephant trainers and they wear special uniforms of dark blue and a thick linen, so you can imagine how sweaty us foreigners were in the getup. After dressing for the occasion, we were briefed on Thai elephant commands and then drew cards with the names of our elephants and their official mahouts. My elephant was Singkorn, who is 33 years old and a mother of three with another on the way (I didn’t find out until about 36 hours into the experience that she was pregnant, so I felt very bad for kicking & yelling at a pregnant elephant). My mahout was Berm, a 40-something year old Thai man from Lampang who spoke nearly no English and deeply loved Singkorn. This was common of the mahouts; they love their elephants and don’t know two licks of English. After meeting our elephants and mahouts, we were instructed to climb atop them. This went so poorly for all. At one point, my mahout looked at me, terrified & clueless atop my elephant, and questioned “3 days?” and I ashamedly replied “Yes...” and we both buckled up for a very long trekking experience. Luckily the experience only got better with time. The first day we went on to watch other elephants put on a show, learned how to make elephant dung paper, and bathed our elephants in a reservoir. By bathed our elephants I mean our mahouts lead the elephants with us on them into a body of water until they dunked down to the point of making us float. Then we left the elephants in the jungle to sleep for the night as we returned to our accommodations at the training school. When my mahout and I returned to the jungle to fetch Singkorn the next morning, she had torn down the tree she was chained to. My mahout simply said, “Oh...wow” then we carried on with the day. The second day consisted of trekking into the depths of the jungle on our elephants for an hour or so before finding our camp. The camp had three raised bamboo huts; that night we slept on one under mosquito nets while our mahouts slept on one on the opposite side of the camp without any amenities. There was also a kitchen type hut and three Thai-style toilets (ceramic toilets without plumbing, so you flush by pouring a bucket of water down them). Along with us and our mahouts, there were a couple older Thai women who served as kitchen staff as well as a young Thai woman named Mat who served as a sort of tour guide/organizer/language mediator. Mat was awesome, she gave us much insight into the mahout lifestyle. After settling into camp, our mahouts took us on a jungle hike to a beautiful waterfall, stopping along the way to pick wild nuts, exotic flowers, and chop down bamboo walking sticks for us. Despite not being to communicate, the mahouts were very kind and generous toward us. Later on they each carved us our own bamboo cups and made rice and hot water in bamboo shoots over a campfire. Once the evening set in, my favorite mahout moment occurred: the mahouts invited us to take moonshine whiskey shots with them. They carved their own bamboo shot glasses, made their own whiskey, and were kind enough to share it with us. It was a hilarious situation looking back on it. Chelsea and I had never really drank together before and Chelsea and her mom had definitely never taken shots together before. The whiskey was shockingly good, some of the best I’ve had. The mahouts would speak in Thai, us in English, and occasionally we’d stumble through questions in the same language. Mat assisted in translating from time to time and Chelsea did the best she could in Thai, but for the most part we all just laughed at each other taking shots. The best was when my mahout found out we were teachers. He acknowledged the word, gave us a look of shock, and then passed an adamant shot our way accompanied by a  gleeful chuckle. It’s safe to say we slept soundly on our stiff beds of bamboo that night. The next morning we roused ourselves, mounted the elephants one last time, and headed back to the Training School to receive our official Mahout Training Completion certificates before saying our goodbyes. It was a rocky start, but in the end I can admit this will likely become one of my most cherished adventures.