I am awoken in the early hours of the morning by the worldwide pub crawl crew singing me a not entirely complimentary version of happy birthday from the garden below. I tell them that it would be nice to go back to sleep in my usual courteous manner (ahem).
It is indeed my birthday. I don’t tend to celebrate them, though I do go down to a bar by the river with Laurie and Brian and discover some of our party bathing elephants in the water. This I can’t resist, so dive in. We are charged a small fee to do this and I’m not sure that we are doing much of a service to the elephants, being clearly capable of bathing themselves. The elephant I am on has a scar behind the ear, that being where the mahout keeps hitting him with a stick to get its’ attention. However, I think the elephant enjoys going through the performance of spraying its ‘bather’ and rolling over to throw me off.
The town reminds me a lot of the quieter parts of the Caribbean as the environment is much the same and the restaurants and homes lining the road are mainly wood huts, though not too run down and not without some creative decorative touches. We stop for lunch at one of these huts before our elephant ride. In our first experience of Nepalese restaurant service, it takes two hours before we get our food, which we have to gulp down to get our jeep to the elephants.
The elephant ride in the jungle is fun although not entirely comfortable, with four people on a wood platform on the back of each elephant, as well as the mahout at the front. There are several occasions where the elephant seems to forget it’s carrying passengers as we get consumed by tree leaves and branches. The most common sightings are rhinos, which seem unperturbed by people on elephants surrounding them. We get quite close, but they are used to it and also they don’t bother elephants. The ones we see are fairly small, being either female or their young. We also see a lot of deer as well as the odd boar hiding in the bushes.
After the elephant ride, Laurie, Brian and I go back to the bar by the river to watch the sunset. Back at the hotel, I get given a quite fabulously disgusting birthday cake by Lu, and spend a little time chatting around the table in the garden. There is a cat doing the petting rounds, although Meg declines, saying that she doesn’t like cats as she thinks they are smarter than her. I am drunk enough to be in bed by 7pm.
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