While I still prefer to stumble along, blindly, discovering things at my own pace, I've learned to appreciate there are certain things you need a little bit of help with -- such as booking an elephant ride, rather than simply lassoing one of the beasts in the wild and heading off bareback into the jungle.
In 2010, during my fourth trip to Southeast Asia, I finally overcame my prejudice against tours and booked an all-day excursion out of Chiang Mai. The Thais have been catering to tourists for years and have got things like this down to a science.
For around $30, someone will pick you up (possibly on time) at your hotel and shuttle you to a mini bus for your trip into hinterlands. My group was a typical mish-mash of international tourists -- a couple of French, a few Japanese, a German couple, and Keevan, another aging American survivor of the 60s.
After riding for about 90 minutes, we reached a jungle village where a group of ethnic Burmese, called White Karen, eked out a living growing crops, raising their own livestock, and handcrafting scarves and jewelry to sell to tourists like us. The term White Karen comes from the fact that girls wear white until they marry, at which time they can wear more colorful garb. Our tour guide noted he'd never seen a female past puberty wearing white, explaining that without television, there wasn't much else to do at night. As a result, the marrying age was quite young.
After wandering around for a while, trying not to upset the local piglets that were tethered below each home, we took off on a trek through the rice paddies and along a surprisingly clean mountain river. Eventually, we reached a waterfall and rested while the braver of us took a dip in the ice-cold swimming hole.
Next on the agenda was the elephant ride. Having never been on a pachyderm before, I wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to do, neither did my riding partner, Keevan.
Other than buying a bunch of bananas to try and get on the good side of our ride, we just walked down a wooden platform and stepped right out onto the elephant. Now, let me assure you, while we weren't much of a burden to the animal, it surely knew we were there. Every few steps, she would bend her trunk back up over her head and aggressively prod us for a banana. If we balked, the animal immediately stopped and blew warm, elephant spit/snot over the both of us. Needless to say, we kept chucking bananas her way as long as we could.
It didn't help when a small, riderless elephant snuck up behind us (you wouldn't think that was possible) and grabbed Keevan's bunch of bananas. While I was laughing at Keevan's shocked look at being stripped of his fruit, something strong and warm grabbed at my ... well, to be honest, my crotch. Nothing really gets your attention like having an elephant mistake your manhood for a quick snack.
The last segment of the trip was a relaxing ride down the Mae Wang River on a bamboo raft. The best part was that the slowly sinking raft rode so low in the water it provided cooling relief for any swelling related to the afore-mentioned incident.
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