Tag Archives: chiang mai

Lahu Life

We’re in the Cameron Highlands, the tea capital of Malaysia. Enjoying a slow pace of life drinking tea with homemade scones and trekking the surrounding jungles after a hectic ten days whizzing through Singapore-Kuala Lumpur-Melaka-KL again. KL was characterised by the daily quest to stick to our budget in a city that prides itself on its shopping malls. I rarely succeeded. Decided that I’m much more content when out of the big cities and surrounded by countryside, a state of mind which I’m sure was influenced by the massage course which we completed a couple of weeks ago in the Lahu village, just north of Chiang Mai in Thailand.

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Transport review: elephants vs. trains

This is what it looks like when an elephant treads on your foot:

Fortunately Matt was spared a more dramatic injury since we were in a river an hour outside of Chiang Mai washing said elephants at the time, and his foot sank into the sand below. Still, its massive toenail left an impressive mark. I was unaware of these developments as I was trying to tame my elephant at the time: being a young one it became overly excited when we reached the water and dived in head first. Whilst the others were sitting nicely letting their owners for the day give them a nice scrub, ours was rolling around with its legs in the air. This took place once we had learnt the basic Mahout commands necessary to ride the elephants, then fed them a gargantuan amount of bananas to sweeten them up to us doing so. Continue reading

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