Elephants!

As you can see, We Love Elephants! And of course now more than ever since we got to see them (and ride one) at the Elephant Park outside of Chang Mei (note: we will try to do a similar thing on Koh Samui). You can see that Mom is excited even before we get in.
The first thing she did was buy a bunch of bananas and sugar cane to feed them. The first elephant she got close took tried to take the whole bunch when she wasn't looking. But did she back down? No!!! She took back her bananas and then handed them out one at a time. After that the elephants were in love with her.

Not sure they gave me the same respect.

After that we got to see them take a bath. That was great although you couldn't help but notice that bath time was also apparently the time for the elephants to er, ah, go number 2 (I have nicely cropped the pictures for the blog). I wouldn't have wanted to be the two people standing downstream with big baskets whose job it was to, how can I say this delicately, preserve the water sanitation downstream.
The elephants seem to love bath time, although that is also a chance for them to play a little joke on unwitting tourists.
Then they did the show, it included playing soccer, playing harmonicas (yep!), dancing, and other stuff, but the most amazing thing was the painting. I didn't think it would be that interesting, but when you see it in person ... it's unbelievable (unglaublich for Claire). The trainer would dip the brush in different colors and then hand it to the elephant who would do the rest. This was the elephant closest to us painting.

Here are the finished products. All elephants did something different.

And then it was off on our ride (for those who wanted to go). At one point the trainer got down and walked ahead and it was just us on our elephant. It turned out our elephant, Maesa, was a mother and we went by her baby on the way. We also got to go in the stream. We have lots more pictures, but we'll wait till were home to show them all.