Etcetera

Surin is the site of the annual elephant roundup, where a large portion of the domesticated elephants in the country converge on one town for a day or two. I guess the goal is to see just how smelly one town can be.

About 60 KM north of Surin is Ban Taklang, aka Elephant Village, where a bunch of elephants spend the off-season. We checked in to a hotel in Surin on Sunday night after our Cambodian sojourn and I asked about the elephant village. All the literature describe a bucolic village where elephants and their owners live in symbiotic bliss, bathing, roughhousing, and generally having a grand old time together.

I'm sorry, the hotel lady said, all the elephants are in Bangkok right now working.

???

There were, she said, still baby elephants around. I guess maybe elephant child labor law is strict in Thailand (all evidence in Bangkok tourist areas to the contrary). So we figured we would go anyway and check it out.

The reality was somewhat different from the marketing information. A bunch of guys sitting in the shade as their elephants stood chained to trees throughout a small part of a village (there were adult elephants there too. It seems that not all the adults were in Bangkok for meetings). Many of the elephants showed that psychosis that caged animals develop, swaying back and forth repeatedly, sort of like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man when he got agitated. Sort of sad.

But I bought a bunch of bananas anyway and gave a few to some of the elephants. I mean, elephants are cool.

This little guy was pretty aggressive in his demands for bananas. I guess I would be too if I stood around all day chained to a tree and my only respite was jackass tourists feeding me fruit.




Before the elephant village, we visited Phanom Rung and Muang Tam, which was south of Surin. So as we headed back through and drove north to the elephant village, we stopped off for some lunch at a roadside chicken stand. It was, without a doubt, the tastiest chicken we'd ever had. A plate of rotisserie chicken, picked clean, then back on the road.


Rural Thailand has fantastic roads. To get to the elephant village, we had to go off the roads marked on our atlas and rely on signs that were few and far between. Even the very rural farm roads were in great shape, as can be seen below. From the elephant village we had to go basically due west. Based on our atlas, we were in the middle of a triangle of no roads, so we decided to try just going west. We would come to Ts or crossroads, find someone, and ask which way to Satuk. Worked like a charm, and we were soon back on roads we could find on the map and on our way to our last tourist stop, Prasat Hin Phimai.