Wednesday night, elephant riding and tiger kingdom

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Wednesday night was the night we decided to see what Chiang Mai's night life had to offer. After our evening meal, we went looking for cocktail bars, coming across a few dodgy looking ones displaying British men surrounded by about five Thai women. These bars weren't for us. We did, however, find a touristy bar called 'John's Place', which was cheap and cheerful. Here, we got talking to two other travellers, Dan and Geraud, from England and Switzerland, respectively.
It was a really fun night, we also got chatting to another group of tourists finding one of them was from bristol and that his brother was in Hollie's year in primary school- small world, he was also studying economics at swansea which is Hollie's plan come september. Another slightly less major coincidence was that Dan is from Ripon, the same place as Jess's yorkshire cousins live 😊 we got on really well with Dan and Geraud so we were disappointed to hear they were leaving the next day. We found out later on in the evening though that Dan was planning to go on a road trip, and said he could stop back through on the Friday so we could join him after our elephant trip on thursday.
Thursday was an absolutely brilliant day, albeit Hollie throwing up in a mini bus (not due to a hangover, but because of dodgy fruit...). We first went to an elephant camp, which we were a bit apprehensive about because we weren't particuarly keen on seeing elephants playing football and painting, however, on arrival we saw that the elephants were happy and had lots of space to walk around in a natural environment. The first thing we did at the elephant park was bamboo rafting, which was very relaxing to just sail down the river and see beautiful surroundings.
Next we saw the elephants bathing in the river and then an elephant show where they demonstrated how they could do group activities, such as a little routine to music as well as one or two older elephants who had been trained to do football and paint, the paintings were actually impressive...! Our elephant ride was next, quite bumpy, but a worthwhile experience and we fed our elephant sugar cane and bananas along the way.
After leaving the elephant camp, we headed to Tiger Kingdom! There were many things offered here, for example we could play with the newborns (the most expensive unfortunately) and we could also sit and stroke some of the older tigers. We chose to see a medium sized tiger. Walking into their large natural cage, we saw two beautiful, big tigers called Leo and Sophia. We both stroked them, sat with them and took a lot of photos! The experience was absolutely incredible, we both wanted to take a tiger home with us afterwards!
That evening we met up with Dan for a meal after he had seen Geraud off to china and ate at a restaurant near the bar we had met at, after a lovely meal and some massive milkshakes we went to a reggae bar with live music for a drink before heading home.

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Comments

[Phil]

Elephant Riding
Girls please can you come home right now I am so jealous at reading all your great adventures. They say travel broadens the mind. I think it definitely teaches you many many things you just cant learn at school. I just love travelling, having done lots of it I never tire of seeing new places and having new experiences. It stays with you forever. Any extra monies we get (and with the boys going to uni there's none around!!!) I'm happy to spend it travelling. I want to take Julie round the world again when the boys are parcelled away and (hopefully) in work in a few years. But this time I want to take a good few months over it so we can really chill out without thnking about going back to work next week. We've seen alot of places so I was thinking of doing something like China, Vietnam and Cambodia for starters. Anyway. Lanzarote - a different type of holiday is just around the corner and just as exciting. Take care you two xx