Hello all,

Hope you are all still doing lovely! :) In Chiang Mai city now! Have been here for a few days after completing an amazing week at the Elephant Nature Park on the outskirts of Chiang Mai (google it... Its lovely :D).

I had the most amazing week there and now absolutely adore elephants!!!! There were about 60 volunteers at the park which meant so many different people to meet! As soon as I arrived at the office meeting point everyone seemed so lovely. I got a free tshirt, water flask, a really pretty flask holder and 2 free muffins! Wooppeee what a treat.

On our first day when we arrived, it was pretty chilled. We had an orientation of the park and fed the elephants and in the evening they held a blessing ceremony to wish us health and good luck on our travels. It was really sweet... They got the elderly women from the village to come and bless these white bracelets for us (which represented purity and happiness) and presented each of us with them! We were told to keep them on for 3-7 days (any less or longer would bring bad luck) and to carry them around with us for the entirety of our travels to protect us and keep us safe. Not sure what their average success rate is :) but it was a lovely idea and am still carrying mine around now so fingers crossed they work :). We were put in relatively basic rooms but directly opposite where the elephants sleep with just a small fence between us and them (so we most definitely had a loo with a view) and I was put with a really nice girl, the same age as me, called Olivia. Up until the thursday me and Olivia were having painfully freezing cold showers as we were unaware 3 of the showers (out of about 12) had hot running water!!! Woops!

While I was at the park, a lot of my time was spent shovelling poo (elephants don't half do massive, heavy turds!), painting and fixing fences (I'm awful with paint rollers and spades), washing and preparing fruit (I'm amazing with a machete), cutting grass for the elephants and doing other little tasks like that around the park. Although all the tasks were pretty hard work and definitely calorie burning work outs, they were really fun as there were big groups of us and always loads of people to talk to! And I have learnt that (probably to everyones horror) I love using machetes! I think I was pretty good at it as well and was allocated watermelon machete chopper despite being the clumsiest girl alive!!!!

Along with those daily tasks, we had loads of contact with the elephants which was amazing! They had 2 main feeding times a day and a bathing time! We also went on elephant treks around the park where we could check up on them and feed them bananas (they love bananas loads...almost more than my little sis)! And spend a bit more time up close to them. The owner of the park had amazing relationships with the elephants. It was crazy to watch them following her around like they were little puppies (even when she had no food!). She was like a real life elephant whisperer. This one time, she invited us to watch her sing a lullaby to the baby elephants and it was the most amazing thing to watch! She sat under all these huge elephants and sung to them! All their eyes started dropping and they folded their tongues in their mouth similar to us sucking our thumbs when we're tired! It took a while but the baby elephant fell fast asleep lying down! It was so mesmerising to watch! I did attempt this lullaby singing with some of the other elephants later in the week but failed miserably... They just wanted my bananas! :(

The project put on loads of little extra things for us to do which was so nice! We had a visit to a thai school where the kids climbed all over us like little monkeys! It was a very odd school as the older ones were learning to do massages and cooking and smoothie/iced tea making and bracelet making! We also had a thai lesson where we learnt about thai culture and learnt some useful phrases. We were taught a song about an elephant (a Chiang) but I can only remember the first line which goes 'Chiang Chiang Chiang' and it is extremely irritating to have just that stuck in your head. We learnt a song about picking/peeling/mashing/shaking/dancing a banana along with a very unusual dance routine. The dance moves to the shaking the banana verse were a little too sexual for some of the older volunteers liking (I'll leave that to your imagination).

In our free time we were able to do whatever we wanted. We could walk down to town (but we only ventured as far as the shop 2 minutes down the road to buy our Hong Thong Whisky and Chang Beer for the evening!!!). They provided rubber rings so we could go tubing down the river which was lovely and relaxing minus the part where you had to try and avoid the massive elephant poos floating along side you. On our last night they gave us a special traditional sit down on cushions in a circle finger-buffet style dinner and some traditional thai dancers came and performed for us! It was really lovely.

I couldn't write this without writing about a consistent topic of my blog entrys so far... Food! The food was incredible! It was all vegetarian but sooooo good! For breakfast, lunch and dinner we had huge buffets and greedily all packed our plates every meal time! I don't normally like tofu in England but their tofu was literally to die for (I'm almost convinced it wasn't vegetarian)!!! It was soooo good!

Oh and while I was there I had some more good news... I found out I won an award!!! It was an outstanding contribution to Brunel University award along with an £100 reward so very happy with that :) another little thing I can add to bulk up the CV! woooo :)

Since I finished the elephant park on Sunday, I've been relatively busy. Me and all the volunteers had an extremely messy night out, I stood on a stage and sung karaoke to a song I didn't know (not my choice of song) while the words froze on the screen with just the title (so humiliating), we went to a reggae bar where I bought it upon myself to break dance surrounded by cheering Asian men, I've chilled out and had a cheeky oil massage (not one of those weird thai ones), I've had a nice pedicure (which to my horror exposed most my toes being black and bruised from climbing Kili), I've seen lots of temples, I've seen monks chant and spoken to a few adorable ones, I've been to a cute little town called Bo Sang also known as umbrella village, I've eaten lots more food (shock) and had a very lovely time.

On Thursday, the last of the elephant conservation volunteers left chiang mai so I moved from a relatively nice air conditioned room with her, to a non air conditioned, 8 bedded hostel dorm with 7 other random people. The rooms not been full any night but the people in them have seemed nice.

On Thursday night I was lucky to bump in to some wokingham girls who invited me on a cooking course with them yesterday. It was amazingggggg. I made chicken paneang curry, thai beef salad, tom yum prawn soup (I think that's what its called) and minced chicken with holy basil which all tasted incredible. I also learnt how to make spring rolls, pad thai, papaya salad, banana spring rolls, and lots of other curries from watching the others make their choices. We got a really cute recipe book after aswell with all the recipes in! It was so nice so big thai dinner party when I return in October :D

My uni friend Becky arrives tonight and I can't wait :D I had a bit of a chilled day around a posh hotels pool today, read my book and updated my travel journal (that i've written every day). It didn't feel that sunny this morning but apparently I was very wrong. I now have what look like pale skin coloured shorts on (horrible, really embarrassing tan/burn lineeeees. Eeeeeeew) hopefully they'll go pretty promptish.

The plan from tomorrow onwards is to possibly do a Buddhist meditation course here in Chiang mai at a temple with the monks then go up to a pretty little town called Pai then down to Bangkok for some floating markets, more temples, and possibly a ping pong show (just for a laugh ehhhh!) then down to the southern islands! Can't wait to get going now!

Hope you are all well! Missing you all loadssss and please continue to email me cause I love reading them and will reply when I can although wifi and internet is really not great!