elephants or yes, we would like a thai massage

The next morning, Wenesday, we woke up in Lampang and took a 45 minute sangtaew ride to the Elephant Conservation Center - which is a little bit like Sea World for elephants -- only you were allowed to ride Shamoo - hi spud.

Note: Chuck/Dad: We checked out the situation before riding the elephants and there were totally calm and subdued - it was very touristy and safe... never fear. We love you.

The conservation center had a few shows you could go see: the elephants bathing - which meant they walked into a lake and then out of it - the elephants stacking logs in a pile - which was as boring as it sounds, the elephants playing music - almost cool, the elephants putting a hat on their trainers head - actually cool, and an elephant painting a picture - sometimes it looked like awkward pollack painting, but one of them painted a few roses - that was pretty fucking impressive. If you want one, we can pick one up for you. Only 500 bhat.

Oh, and we also saw them making paper out of elephant dung. Yes, paper. Yes, elephant shit. They are very proud of this. We bought a bookmark made out of it. Nice.

Then we got to see a few baby elephants with their mothers. That was cool, they were so cute. We fed them bananas... the mothers would just eat the whole banana but we had to peel them for the babes, good times. We have awesome pictures of this.

Then finally we got to ride the elephants. This was incredible. Josh and I rode together on a little seat that was strapped around the elephant. We had a guide in front who led us around - our whole group went at the same time, so there were six elephants walking in a row, except for some reason our leader kept taking us off into the random part of the jungle... not sure why. Again, we have amazing photos - stay tuned.

We had lunch at the conservation center and then headed to the elephant hospital. Tedda face. The hospital is pretty impressive, but of course sad because there are injured elephants. Most of the injuries occur because there are land mines between Thailand and Burma and even though it's illegal some elephants are still used to clear the mines. This is awful. There were two elephants who lost half of one of their legs, but amazingly the doctors constructed prosthetic legs for them. It is the only elephant hospital in the world and was established 15 years ago.

After the elephants, we took off in ANOTHER sangtaew for the Sankampang hot spring. We thought we could swim in the hot spring. But, no, you could literally boil an egg in the hot spring - one of the girls in our group bought a few to try - it was over 100 degree celcius, we are still not sure exactly what that means. We could swim in a mineral pool, however. Which was great after being all hot and sweaty again -- after swimming we saw that there was a set-up for thai massages right near by.

And yes, we would like a foot massage. Best 200 bhat we spent so far. (That's about 6 dollars) Most of our group joined us. Also, one of the thai women, realizing we spoke english - haha, i don't know how, maybe it was our matching dodger hats - asked Lindsey to help her with English. Lindsey attempted to teach her the word "teach" or "teacher" but ended up having to use it in the sentance "I am not a very good teacher" -- oh well.