Howdah you do it?

After another sock coffee and a baguette we were picked up on time by our transport to Elephant Village (a 15km journey out of LP)

On arriving we quickly made our way over to the elephant feeding station, there was about 8 elephants (some huge!) munching away on a combo of banana and palm stalks, stripping away the outer parts with their trunks. The elephants have to eat 250 kilos of food a day as they are not good at digesting it. The village is a sanctuary that pays local villages some money to use the elephants for tourism rather than them being used in the logging industry.

10 minutes later we were waiting to board our elephant 'Mae Son' who was 37 years old. She was overworked and mistreated whilst logging, pulling trucks far heavier than she could carry and given MDMA to make her work harder and longer. She also lost her eye sight when a chain broke and hit her in the eye. Apparently it took a while for her to start responding to being treated well within the sanctuary.

Tash and I were sat together on the howdah (this is a chair on top of an elephant) and our mahout (elephant trainer) was sat on her neck. As we moved off it felt smoother than I thought it would, until we noticed we were going to go down a slope that was at about a 45 degree angle towards the Nam Kahn river. As Mae Son slowly made her way down the path, we were bouncing side to side (elephants can only move one leg at a time that can make it bumpy) - good job we had seat belts on! We were amazed that she got us to the river banks, even squeezing past some rubble that was obstructing the path (not sure why they don't move it but maybe that's intentional). Getting into the water was no issue, we noticed that she walked with her trunk under the water but with it looped round so that the end was poking out! The ride lasted for about an hour, going back onto land and back into the water again, up through a village before heading back to the feeding station.

We fed her some bananas, although she wanted more bits of trees first. On moving away from the station we were shown an elephant with a bad leg, when you looked at her foot it was purple and looked if a small bit was damaged - she had stepped on a land mine. Its unbelievable to think it would have ripped a leg off a human (if not killed them) but these animals are so big the damage was much less (still not great that it happened though and it did have a limp).

The villages also have lodges that you can stay in if you book one of their longer trips, would be a cool place to stay. We went to use the swimming pool, with some great mountain views and then had some lunch before heading back to our hotel.

In the afternoon back in LP we went to get a boat across to the other side of the Mekong to a village named Xieng Men. We made a deal with a boatman to take us across as I didn't know where the public ferry went from (this was disappointing as the guide book said that would be an experience). The ride was only 5 minutes but it took longer for him to get his boat ready than the journey itself.

We navigated up the river bank and onto the main path. The path itself was well made and impressive for a little Lao village. We looked around some temples, which were nice and quiet. We did pass 3 other tourists on the way down to one of them but otherwise it was a good not to see many. One temple had a cave, but the
gates were locked so we had to miss that out. We had only arranged an hour wait time for with the boatman, but we could have easily spent a few hours there.

Back on the other side we went for a massage, this time having time to try out a full Lao one in a place that was quite cheap (only £4) but maybe not as good surroundings as some of our others (we were in some kind of open sided building on stilts so part outside). The massage itself was good, they did more of the cat pudging type moves, and also massaged my eyebrows!

We shared plates for dinner but I missed the fact it was nearly all pork dishes so we were in for meat overload again. Who knew "river weed" would taste like bacon and be much better than seaweed? The pork stuffed bamboo shoots were also good but the pork stew with edible leaves (not sure what this was, but looked identical to something tash had the night before) was more stodgy than a stew I'd make/was used to. We tried Lao sausage again, these were better than the ones in Vientiane but still nothing to shout about.

Bowls of rice; 41
Lao coffees; 9