Sadly, we left our Thai village, Tha Phon for the last time and the 8 of us packed into the 4WD. How many elephants can you pack into a mini? The way we are eating (plus the swollen ankles) that is probably not a bad description!
A long trip to Khao Yai National park was interuppted by the usual toilet stops with the accompanying highly distracting market stalls. While travelling along the way, Bruce (uncle) said ‘It’s a shame we haven’t seen any elephants. As he was saying it we looked to the left and there were 6 enormous elephants swaying in a ‘conservation park’. Peter pulled over immediately… because he is an extremely tolerant and patient bloke! According to his mother (my Grandmother) he has never raised his voice in anger in his whole life. Surprisingly that includes driving us around Thailand and putting up with our tiresome habits!
The elephants were dauntingly large but we got to sit on their knee, feed them and Col and I had a ride through creeks and paddocks for 15 minutes. Sitting on an elephants knee with it’s swinging trunk and big eye right next to your face is quite an experience.
While we were having our ride, the others went to a shopping place up the road. The shopping centre was built to look like Venice and was quite stunning. If we had more time it would have been lovely to inspect it more closely but we were already running typically late.
We got to the Khao Yai national park at 4pm and considering how much we paid to get in, it was unfortunate that stopping to see the elephants had made it so late in the day. The advantage of this was that there were plenty of animals out. Our drive through the park took about 1 and a half hours. We dodged plenty of elephant poo and saw lots of deer, monkeys, lizards with the occassional cobra (stick) and boa constrictor (imaginary).
We arrived at Petchabury (spelling?) our destination in the dark and discovered that where we had planned to stay, had no vacancies. After trying several places we chose to keep driving. Once we finally found somewhere to stay, my headache and upset tummy had reached a new height and I was feeling so sick I went to bed and left the others to go and have tea. Lorraine (aunt) was also sick with what seemed to be the same bug.
Our next stop was Ko Sumet. Hmmm beach!