Hi guys we are back in Surin and I'm sitting in the carpark of the thai equivalent of asda borrowing someone's wifi.

We have just got back from our first week working with the elephants and it was awesome. We are staying with a mahout called Mr Lee and his family. There were five of us this week and it has gone by soo fast.

We arrived on our first day and got taken to meet the elephants, mine is called Mon which I think is short for monster cause she is huge!!! After stroking them and feeding them we got to ride them into the river, where mon decided to roll over with me on her back so I got to go swimming as well that day. After bath time we rode them back to the forest where they sleep and said good bye. That night we ate with the family and watched a badly dubbed movie while playing connect four with the village kids.

Over the next three days we rode the elephants three more times, collected food for them (they eat a lot of food), mucked them out (not too messy) and even got to see a new four year old that they are bringing into the village to train. Ooh and took about three hundred photos - I'm going to run out of space fast!

Every evening we played with the local kids and Mr Lee is trying to teach us Thai (which is really hard). We even got to go to the local night market - which out in the sticks is a bit like a boot fair and tried some local delights like mini doughnuts (closest I can get), chicken asses on a stick and frog.

We've seen the flooding first hand - the local community is having to use combine havesters to collect the rice (they normally do it by hand) as they are afraid its going to spoil and that's only the fields they can get too, soo much of it is still under water. Although it does make for fun swimming on the roads.

We also saw a show in the nearby elephant research village with an elephant who can paint - how do you teach an elephant that?

We have a few days in Surin (city) now so we're going to chill out for a bit before going back out again next week.

Mr P