We woke up to the gentle tapping of an elephant at the door of the room. The keeper had with him a basket of cut sugar cane for us to feed the elephant breakfast, which was super cool. The tip of their trunks is very sensitive, and gently curving the trunk around the proffered sugar cane the elephant simply tosses it inside her mouth to happily grind it using her massive molars.
Today we were bound for adventure, to make up for yesterday being such a sedate day. Pat has a master plan that today will take us to the Doi Inthanon, which at 2,500 m amsl (about 8,500 ft amsl) is the tallest mountain in Thailand. The peak is inside the national park of the same name, which is one of the pet projects of the Thai King, who is a progressive monarch that supports a lot of infrastructure and educational projects. The ride was spectacular but very challenging because the mountains were clad in mist, and as soon as we reached that level we started getting very wet. The broad-leaf forest gives way to a weird mixed conifer and banana trees forest, which in some canyons are replaced by giant ferns. There is water everywhere, and many creeks form pretty waterfalls as they run over the landscape. The Thai Highlands are a group of north-south oriented ranges that were uplifted as India (to the west) plowed its way under Asia to form the Himalayas. When teaching students to draw the plate tectonics map of the Earth I typically follow them as a type of transform margin that connects the Indonesian trench with the Himalayas obduction margin.
The higher we went, the wetter it got and the colder. By the time we reached the summit the temperature was down to 14 degrees C, although with the wind chill it felt like it was almost freezing. To think that a couple of days previous we had almost melted at Chiang Mai.
The ride back was a bit scary, because the slopes were steep and covered with water, and we had to ride our brakes. It was also hard to see, with water collecting on the visor of the helmet and my glasses fogging with condensation. But we made it down at the end, just in time to grab something to eat and move into our new room (River 9), on a very precarious slope overlooking the small stream that runs through the community.
So, the way this eco-lodge works is that a whole community has pitched together to build three clusters of guest rooms (8 to 10) at each of three localities. Last night we stayed at the Garden locality, near the rice fields, and this night we are staying at the River locality. The neighbors of each locality provide the tourist support in terms of maintaining the cabins, bringing breakfast to each cabin in the morning, and bringing the elephant to wake you up (I believe each section has two or three elephants trained for that purpose). Outside of that you are pretty much on your own, but everyone in the community smiles and would gladly answer questions. Pat and Karen went down to the river to play in the water, but I stayed back to try to dry things out before the rain got going.
Man, did it rain and rain all night long. There is a mass of moist air moving west from Vietnam, and we have a weather advisory for the next three days!
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