Meet Pratchua. She's my elephant. And she's a little madam! She's an attention seeker, a shameless flirt and a fussy eater -- we developed quite a bond. Like mahout*, like elephant? David's words, not mine!

Funnily enough, Pratchua had an enormous crush on David's elephant JoJo. I realised this while I hung on for dear life, as she rocketed past him on the narrow trail -- completely ignoring my comands for her to slow down, I might add -- only to come to a dead stop to wait for him to catch up, before charging off again. Rinse and repeat.

Apparently elephants get a little over excited when spending the night on their own in the jungle.

I did however enjoy collecting her each morning at sunrise (or at least I enjoyed her company once I'd bribed her with some sugar cane). It was nice to have that one-on-one quite time with them**, in their natural surroundings, before the park was opened to day visitors.

At first, it was a bit of a surreal experience. After a quick tutorial on elephant command works (in Thai***), we got to take our elephants down to the pond for a bath... But we had an audience. About 50 shrieking school children, and a handful of overwhelmed looking westerners, were crammed into the viewing stands waiting to feed the elephants bananas. So after letting the elephants gorge themselves for a bit -- and fielding questions from awe-struck tourists, who clearly thought us experts**** -- we herded the elephants into the water to give our audience a proper show.

I've never been so wet. It's a skill not to fall off your elephant as it ducks under the water -- and just incase a bit of you is still dry, JoJo (encouraged by his mahout and later David, once he cottoned-on) will hose you down with water*****. And not that he needed any further help, but I swear my mahout was in cahouts with David's: I actually caught him angling JoJo's trunk at me!

So, rather wet, I'd have liked to have had time to dry off. But our jobs weren't done. We were to parade our elephants up to the show ground for a display of mahout and elephant collaboration. Now I thought we'd get involved in the show on our last day, but no, we were thrown in the deep end. We demonstrated the different ways to get on and off the elephant, how to make them lie down and pick things up. Again, a little surreal. But we did slot into a routine, after doing this every day, twice a day for three days. As I said it was nice to have the time in the jungle with them.

Or, as I learnt to do, make myself useful to my mahout in the staging area between shows (the other trainees seemed more than happy to just waiting in the 'holding area' we'd been assigned too). I do think I was lucky though: my mahout really took an interest in teaching me extra commands; showing me how to tether and untether the elephant; he even showed me how to feed her bananas by putting them straight onto her tung rather than letting her take them from me with her trunk.

That's actually when I discoved Pratchua was a fussy eater: she'd spit out the unripe bananas.

Our final treat was being allowed to visit the elephant nursery, where they had three babies! Three naughty babies! Don't be fooled by their size, their trunks are incredibly strong and once they have hold of you they won't let go. Really, they're just inquisitive and, like human children, have too much energy -- which, to my delight, the mahouts try to exhaust by playing football with them -- and havn't quite learnt the rules.

It was an experience I will never forget.

* a mahout (don't get them confused with marmots, otherwise you'll offend them) are elephant trainers. An elephant and its mahout are paired when they are young so that they can both grow old together. Apparently you find out pretty quickly if an elephant takes a dislike to their mahout; they're rather choosy.

** be warned, never go near an elephant without a mahout. No, I will rephrase that: never go near an elephant without IT'S mahout. Elephants are quite capable of defending themselves if they feel threatened... Or if they simply take a dislike to you. Walking out of the jungle one evening, we passed a lone elephant who, apparently, doesn't like my elephant's mahout. So he charged us! I ran so fast I ended up with a massive cut up my leg, along with lots of tiny spines embedded in my skin, from the scrub we ran through :(

*** best way to learn Thai: talking to elephants. Although I'm not sure how useful being able to say "squirt water with your trunk" will be?!

**** after day one, we pretty much were. Or at least, I could answer, how old the elephants were, what were their names, what they liked to eat, could they pet them...

***** it was a slight consolation that I wasn't his only target. JoJo, quite of his own volition, saved his last blast of water for a group of unexpecting school children, back in the stands!