Around Chiang Mai Nov 2009 and trip to Elephant Roundup

This is a major "catch up" post. So much is going on that we are too tired to write and arrange pictures and videos when we get back home!

About a week ago we drove from Chiang Mai to Surin. We took 4 days to drive from Chiang Mai in the northwest to Surin in the northeast (about 600 miles ) and drove back in one long day of 12+ hrs! The first slide in the photos below shows our route. The roads are quite good - not like US interstate highways but at the beginning they are 4 lanes and good surfaces. However, when you get into the mountains it gets slower and the roads have quite tight curves to navigate and are much steeper than the roads in the US. We decided to take several days to get to Surin so as to stop and do sight-seeing along the way and to be able to do fun things like stopping to buy a kite or to take pictures along the way.

Our first stop was Phrae which is an old town but is now quite developed and not particularly interesting except for 2 temples, Wat Luang in town and Wat Pratat Chohae about a mile out of town. I am always amazed by the beauty of the temples, in contrast to the modern concrete shop houses and buildings. From there we went to Phitsanulok for the night and visited a favorite restaurant - the Flying Vegetable Restaurant. See the videos to see the action....... We visited some "touristic" villages that were too touristy for our tastes. The pottery in the second village was supposed to be very interesting but ......

One of the most interesting places we visited was the mountain hold out, Phu Hin Rong Kla, of the Thai Communist Party. The Communist Party was not defeated until the early 1980's so while we lived here it was quite scary at times, not for our own personal safety but that the communists might succeed at some point because the government was not taking care of the poor people in the countryside. The mountain is quite steep and the museum at the top describes the many times the Thai army tried and failed to take over the area. The drive up and down the mountain was very steep with lots and lots of sharp hair pin turns and some amazing views.

Our last night before arriving in Surin we stayed in a nice guesthouse in a small town called Nang Rong so that we could visit two Khmer ruins dating back to the 10th - 13th C. Phanom Rung, our first stop, is situated on a small extinct volcano and faces east towards the original Angkor capital. It took the Thais 17 years to restore the site and there are some nice examples of that period, but Angkor Wat is much more impressive. From there we went down to the valley and visited Muang Dum which means "low city". It was the evening and the surrounding garden and pools made for some beautiful scenes. Both of the temple complexes were constructed for the worship of Shiva and Vishnu and what remains of the iconography depict them from various stories. At that time the Khmer Empire stretched east into what is now part of Thailand.

Here are some pictures from the trip. Some videos which do better at capturing the elephants will be later in the blog. To make the slides go faster place the mouse over the show and click the arrow.


And now we present the "Flying Vegetable Restaurant"


Here are the pictures from a weaving village near Surin and lots of elephants! We arrived in Surin on Friday morning and had tickets for events on Friday night and Sunday morning. We checked into our hotel and went out to visit some nearby villages. To make the slides go faster place the mouse over the show and click the arrow.


Most of the mahouts and elephants come from villages around Surin and Buriram. Some villages in the area specialize in the raising of elephants. They get paid about $ 100 to participate in the event, and then they make money selling food for us to feed the elephants and giving rides. Many of the mahouts I talked to had walked up to 4 days to get to Surin. The elephant round up was fun and well-organized, and if you like elephants where else in the world can you see more than 200 gathered at one time? The show was good, but it was even more fun to see the elephants in the streets amongst the tuk-tuks/motor-cycles/rick-shaws etc. threading their way looking totally unconcerned, and so were the other drivers looking as if this was a usual event. We sat eating dinner while feeding the elephants sugar-cane and offering their mahouts something to drink. We had lunch at a restaurant whose owner liked elephants as well, so every elephant that passed by, stopped, was given sugar-cane to eat, and water to drink, and in some cases was hosed down. The Thais love elephants as well and go for rides as much as the farangs (foreigners). One thing the city has to do every day and night is clean up the HUGE amount of shit on the streets. The output is prodigious!

Here is the videos of the "show"