Elephant Buffet

Every year, Surin (in Eastern Thailand) has a bug huge Elephant Festival. One of the volunteers lives really close, so a few of us went to check it out & I'm sure glad we did!

We decided to stay in dorm rooms (we're cheap volunteers after all...any way to save some money). We had 1 room for 13 people...here's a couple of pics.

I wish I would have gotten one of the bathroom because it was horrid! More so because we only had water 1/3 of the time! Which was first discovered by yours truly when she was taking a shower & the water stopped right after she had put conditioner in her hair & soap on her face (luckily there was still a trickle & I got the face rinsed off, but I ended up wearing conditioner in my hair for the rest of the night).

The first "event" was the Elephant Buffet...and no, you don't EAT the elephants (although Anton tried to convince me otherwise)...you FEED them! Here we are waiting for it to start...

And the elephant food.

There was a lot!!!

The parade floats were made out of fruits & vegetables!

The first elephant. And a LOT more! Let the chaos begin!

We decided to see if we could ride an elephant, so we walked down a ways to see if there was a ramp or something set up to get on the elephants. We stopped to watch a mom pass her terrified child up to one of the seats & all of a sudden, we heard police whistles. Moms were grabbing their children & running...so Peter & I decided it was time to get out of there. (I later found out that 4 people had been trampled by a hungry elephant...they suffered from some broken bones, luckily nothing serious).

We went back to our group & I was feeding an elephant when one of the mahoots (elephant trainers) asked if I wanted a ride. We negotiated & got him down to half what he was charging everyone else (way to go Maria). There wasn't a ramp or anything...so we had to climb onto the food tables then scale the elephant. Here's the back of our mahoot.

We sure got a bird's eye view of the goings on.Many of you know of my fear of heights...and the back of an elephant is pretty high! I took a "self photo," but I was too nervous to let Maria know...it could have been a really cute photo if I wasn't such a chicken!











After all the excitement, we had lunch at a "farang" restaurant.