Elephants don't peel bananas

I thought that after all these entries from Sarah, it was about time that I put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. So here goes...

We decided some time ago that we would take the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, rather than fly up, which would take about an hour. There were several seemingly good reasons for this decision:

1) Sarah loves taking the local public transport
2) It would save us paying for a night's accommodation
3) It would be fun
4) We had obviously forgotten how much we hated our last overnight train journey. (London to Edinburgh - don't do it)

We pitched up at the station and boarded no problem, accepted our complimentary (or so we thought) orange juices and made ourselves comfortable in a cabin just large enough for an oompa loompa travelling alone.

Soon after leaving Bangkok, a very friendly steward (the same one that gave us our orange juices) appeared in the doorway brandishing a menu. A quick glance answered our unasked question; no, the food isn't included. We had already bought some snacks to keep us going, so we politely indicated that we wouldn't be partaking of his culinary delights. This had the effect of changing his attitude completely, it was almost as if we were no longer welcome on the train and should get off immediately.

Then he enquired, 'Do you want to pay for the orange juices now or later?'. These were the same orange juices that were handed out at the beginning of our journey in a fashion that implied they were complimentary. Apparently they were 80 baht and he wanted 10% 'commission'. Cheeky git! (No, he didn't get any commission). He must have passed the word around the train staff that we were tight, because from that moment onwards we were made to feel like a pair of vagrants that they would like to move on to somewhere else. Despite the fact that we were actually travelling in first class!

Anyway, we got very little sleep that night as the air conditioning seemed to have been switched to arctic. All we had were thin sleeping bag liners to sleep in because the blankets that were provided seemed to have been dragged along behind the train before they handed them out.

At least when we arrived in Chiang Mai the sun was shining and the driver from the hostel was waiting for us. We stayed at Eagle House 2, which according to the Lonely Planet is "the better of the Eagle twins", although when Sarah read this out to me I mistakenly thought that she had said that it was "the better of the evil twins". On reflection, I'm glad we weren't staying in the other one.

Our yardstick for accommodation standards has become the hellhole that we stayed at in Negombo. By this measurement, Eagle House was above average, but only marginally.

Desperate not to stay in our room a moment longer we launched ourselves into a one day Thai cookery course, taught by Mr Visutt, who spoke very good English. Sadly, he seemed to have learnt it from watching Dr Who in the Tom Baker era, because his presentation style was very similar to that of a Dalek. Although, I never managed to get him to say 'exterminate, exterminate!'

It was a very good course and hopefully one day Sarah will put it to good use by cooking dinner.

Chiang Mai is a very pleasant city, much calmer than Bangkok, apart from the night bazaar, which is a bit like going to a huge market where they only allow stalls of three different types; hippy beads stalls, fake Rolex stalls and the universally popular 'dead cockroaches in a lovely mahogany frame' stalls (Sarah's personal favourite). Repeated ad nauseam until my blood sugar dropped so low that we had to go and find something to eat (unusual).

There are certain things that all travellers seem to do in Chiang Mai and probably the greatest of these is to go trekking. You can do treks that last anywhere between one and seven days (even longer if you get lost). Sarah and I decided that a one day trek was the best bet for two reasons, firstly, we had very limited time in Chiang Mai and secondly, why would any sane person choose to sleep in a hut in the jungle, being bitten to death by mosquitoes when there is a perfectly good bed in a hostel available? Or are we just not getting into the spirit of things? It seemed that we were wrong, as the city was full of Ray Mears wannabes, just dying to disappear into the hills for a spot of light rambling and starvation....

Our 'trek' first pitched up at the Mae Ping elephant training centre and we walked down to meet the elephants (this was probably the most walking we did all day). It was at this point that I truly surpassed myself in the David Attenborough stakes. Presented with a large bunch of bananas I was informed that I was free to feed them to the elephant standing rather impatiently next to me. So I peeled a banana and gave it to her, she seemed pleased with this system, so I repeated it and again she looked very happy. It was after the third banana that our guide suggested that the elephant might also like to eat the skins! I have to be honest and admit that it took a few seconds for the significance of this statement to sink in. Elephants obviously don't bother peeling bananas in the wild. I don't think they have the manual dexterity.

The rest of the morning passed without major incident, we went for an hour long ride on a twenty five year old elephant with a name that neither of us can remember, but definitely sounded a lot like Taliesin. I don't know whether the training centre ran out of Thai names, but I was a little surprised that their immediate thought was to start using the names of Welsh princes.

The elephant centre was actually very good. After we visited the elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka I was a little concerned by the way the keepers treated the elephants, they didn't seem to have any kind of interest in the elephants beyond getting tips from visitors and were quite happy to give them a good few whacks with a stick for no real reason. Mae Ping was very different, the elephants seemed to be happy and very well looked after. The keepers seemed to have very good relationships with the elephants and our 'driver' was constantly talking to Taliesin throughout our ride.

This was followed by a leisurely bamboo raft trip down the Mae Ping river where we came across the world's most dedicated sales team. Three teenage girls stood chest deep in the river trying to sell hats to the raft passengers as they went past. Unfortunately for these budding entrepreneurs I already have a hat and they were selling the exact same court jester style hats that everybody had been trying to sell us on our elephant ride twenty minutes before.

We narrowly avoided a visit to a snake farm in the afternoon, ending up instead at a butterfly farm. There's an hour of my life that I will never get back.

That was it for Chiang Mai apart from an evening spent brushing up our pool playing and Chang Beer drinking skills, obviously we're still working on the latter.

We've moved on to Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand now and we're relaxing by by the beach. Stay tuned for the next installment.