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This next place we moved onto after Chiang Rai was Lampang, the reason for coming here was to visit an Elephant Conservation Centre, just outside of town. Lampang is not very touristy and when we first got here we were the only western people we saw for hours. Was weird being the minority and people staring at us all the time, Linz felt like a celebrity, but i kinda felt i just had food on me face or something. The guest house we stayed in was amazing, it is totally made out of teak wood and we had our own little balcony which overlooked the river. Not bad considering it was around 6 quid a night!! Don't think i am gonna come back to Britain as far too expensive (only joking mum, don't panic!).
The following day we caught a bus to the elephant centre. The place was really well organised and not cruel to the ellies at all. This was something i was panicking about as some people might know Linz really don't like that stuff and gets upset at animals being treated poorly. The centre itself had near on maybe 100 elephants, all doing different things, some were giving rides, some were there for the show, the baby ones were in a little enclosure and there is also an elephant hospital to look after sick elephants from all over Thailand. Apparently this was the first elephant hospital in the world, they had an elephant ward were you could see some with bandages and even some on drips. As for the baby elephants they were well cool. You could get really close to them and at one point we were having a tug of war with one of the babies, needless to say i won, yeah right!! They were well strong, i was so glad there was a barrier in the way as otherwise i could have been eating dirt!
Later on we saw a show and this was crazy, elephants doing all sorts of things you could never imagine. They played drums, turned on taps, hoisted a flag and even painted a picture! Man, i bet some of the chavs from Braintree couldn't even do that! The way they teach the elephants is the same way they have taught them for 100's of years and all the 'tricks' are based on the work they used to undertake for the logging companies, years ago. We got loads of pictures and when we find a place where we can upload we will bore you silly with them.
But all in all a definate place to recommend if traveling through Thailand.
Grant
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