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Dinner that night of the elephant camp was amazing. We sat down, just the two of us, then Paul and Liz who we were with that day and were then joined by Corrine, a fellow 32 year old from Manchester. We made all our introductions and she told us this was her second night and what a great time she'd been having. They fed us loads of dinner, chicken green curry, cold fresh grilled fish, chicken and vegetables with rice. They couldn't stop feeding us, whenever a dish got low they would fill it up, they really were so generous!
Dinner flew by with food Chang beers and conversation before we moved over to a different seating area where they had lit a bonfire. The mahouts, a mix of Thai and Burmese, all sat with us around the fire playing and singing along on the guitar as we all sat chatting. Thom started to prepare sticky rice for us that he cooked inside bamboo shoots and then on the open fire. When it was done, they then chopped down the length of the hollow bamboo pipe over and over again until it was thin enough to peel, leaving a solid tube or rice you could break off and eat. It was delicious but we were all so full, then they gave us fire heated bananas to eat with it. Again, delicious.
As we sat drinking beer after beer, woody, one of the other mahouts began sharing out glasses of Thai whiskey which was lovely and tasted slightly of rice. They generously topped these up several times.
One of the other mahouts (Michael Peck or David Two or one of the others) roasted some sort of small bird on a stick which he also shared out, to all of our reluctance, tho it tasted nice! Thankfully, that was the last of the food.
Westlife renditions, Elvis, the Beatles mixed with local songs kept coming as we sat there. Strangely it was always difficult to pick out the song as they sang in Burmese making it hard to think of the english words! It was lovely though. They then lit Chinese lanterns for us and we got to release them, making a wish as we did so. It was a really beautiful moment as they went up so high, particularly for Paul as his sister is slowly dying from terminal cancer, so we could guess where his wishes were going. My wish was for Carrie to be able to join us on our travels.
Thom made a suitable suggestion that we should head off to bed about 11am (he'd had no sleep the previous night because of forest fires) and his suggestion was based around highlighting in words and actions the lyrics to lady in red (the part about going to bed/turning off the lights). Funny.
We grabbed a handful of beers and all went up to our bungalow do we could chat more. We did until maybe 1am, then went to bed, it was going to be a full day tomorrow!!
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