Elephant camp

Today, we went out of Chiang Mai further upstream on the River Ping, and had a morning with some elephants.  We had a ride - I took lots of photos, but as anyone who has ridden an elephant will tell you, they are a somewhat bumpy ride, and none of the pictures were very good.  Our Mahout (name something approximating to Joe) also took some pictures of us with our camera, but again, as anyone who has ridden an elephant will also tell you, it's difficult to look dignified up there!

In the end I settled for a picture of Joe washing "our elephant".  They both, along with the rest of the group of elephants and Mahouts, seemed to be having a lot of fun, and much water was splashed around, on elephants and men indiscriminately.

After the elephant camp, we had a lovely ride on a bamboo raft down the River Ping - we saw a number of birds, and I actually got quite a good picture of a kingfisher - it may appear on Flickr at some stage.

And we finished off with lunch at an orchid and butterfly farm.  It's been a hot day today - we've spent the latter part in our room cooling off, and I've finally caught up with blipping.  I've back blipped to the start of our holiday.