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Other entries in Pai

exciting new ways to ride elephants

White water rafting, bareback elephant riding, scootering backpackers without a cause that’s just what we are.That pretty much sums up Pai really.We decided seeing as Keith’s birthday was coming up we would blow our budget to smithereens and do a few mad things around Pai the extreme tourist hotspot with a heavy veggie following too. So we booked our one day rafting because we have so much to do and no time to do it in and we loved every second. The day started out slow a few bumps on the river no more but the people we was with were really cool and we had loads of laughs and was messing around jumping into the river and splashing the other boat. But after lunch the real work started we hit a few bigger bumps with our brilliant captain shouting “GO GO” or “LEFT” “RIGHT” we got these confused almost all of the time. And then when we hit our first class 4 rapid we lost our captain (who had been bounced out of the boat) and was heading for another rapid, me and Keith tried to steady the boat while the others got our captain back just in time for us to make a good effort on the next rapid. From then on we couldn’t stop laughing even when we was heading straight for branches and our boat got pulled between two giant rocks, all of us in the boat just clung together because we knew we really shouldn’t be going that way from the look on our captains face. But as I'm writing it here we made it and had a really fantastic time and will do it again in some other place perhaps catch some class 5.The next day we hired out our own scooter for the 4 hour trip to chang mai and pootled around town seeing the sights before we got the trip underway. We first visited an elephant who was sitting very happily under his “house” roof eating some branches and asked the very bewildered mahood (trainer) if we could have a ride, certainly he said and moved the elephant so we could just climb aboard no bother.  Well we just sat there and watched whilst he put a towel over the elephants back so the hairs wouldn’t itch us and wondered where the saddle went. Then it dawned on us there would be no saddle on this elephant ride. Well ok Nelly we thought here we go and we hopped on with less grace than we would’ve liked and clung on for dear life as our kind wrinkly friend moved off. For those that do not know elephants are scared of anything and everything and this we learned very early on in our trip as a pack of cheeky dogs decided to come up and tease our massive ride, with me and Keith perched on top. Our mahood being a wonderful man threw his stick at the dogs and scared them away, we had the feeling that this had happened often. Our elephant buddy then took off towards the river for a little splash. Thankfully we managed to throw our stuff at our mahood (my t-shirt plopping on his face like a stripper) before the elephant began his bath. I got thrown off first and Keith practically leapt off the elephant screaming thinking it was trying to kill him (I haven’t laughed so much in ages) then we got back on and had a once around the block with our friend munching every plant in sight despite our mahood’s insistence he really shouldn’t.After this we went off on our bike ride and only managed to get one flat tyre (I’m sure the flat tyre fairy is following us around) luckily we was near a village and the mechanic had been tipped off by a local that two tourists were stranded down the road and he came to our rescue on a clapped out old bike that I though should’ve broken down too.After this we were on our way again and had a lovely day even with the rain, and because of the rain we saw a perfect full double rainbow a rare sight indeed.Right that’s enough of this epicLove to all and thank you for the happy birthdays for Keith he’s coming to terms with being 25 and I think a regular beer is helping that.

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