noodles | travel blog

So I was walking through the Old Town the other day, looking for a phone booth that would accept the phone card I had just bought. The girl in 7-Eleven had stressed that it would only work on phones operated by the telecom company TOT. She said this very slowly, while pointing at the word "TOT" on the card. I felt I couldn't go wrong. Half an hour later I had tried four TOT phone booths on three different streets. None of them accepted my card. I was hot, slightly annoyed and slightly dehydrated. When my fifth attempt failed, I approached a tuk-tuk driver who was just waking up from a snooze in the back of his vehicle. He very kindly walked over to the phone booth with me, inserted the card and lifted the receiver. When (again) the card didn't work, he pulled it out and examined it closely. The card had a photo of a yellow butterfly on one side. After a while he nodded, as if in recognition, and said I had to find a yellow phone. I was slightly suspicious. The girl in 7-Eleven, who had been very helpful, had not said anything about TOT phones being colour-coded. Also, I couldn't help thinking that the tuk tuk driver was basing his advice on the photo of the yellow butterfly.

"But isn't this phone yellow?" I said, feebly.

"This phone is orange," he said.

He was right of course. I said I hadn't seen any yellow phone booths in the last half hour, and did he know of any? He said he didn't. (The fact that he didn't offer to drive me to one that he knew of made me even more suspicious.)

"Better you use coins," he said and gave me back the card.

Sound enough advice, when you think about it, but I wasn't ready to give up yet. I thanked the tuk tuk driver and turned randomly onto a very long, deserted side street which, I noticed immediately and to my dismay, had no phone booths whatsoever. Too proud to turn back, I continued walking.

Just as I felt myself getting agitated I saw a little old man waving at me from across the road. His clothes were scruffy and he was carrying a plastic bag. I hesitated, and he nodded (yes, you!). What now, I thought. Twin Peaks? As I crossed the street and approached him he smiled, turned around and walked through a set of tall gates and onto the grounds of a small Buddhist temple. He signalled for me to follow, so I did. I walked with him up the steps, we took of our sandals, and I followed him into the cool shade of the temple. We stopped in front of the altar, which had a few Buddha statues. He sat down and motioned for me to do the same. So we sat there for a while. Then he took me out into the garden, and we sat there for a while. And then he said that he would be needing some money, so I gave him some. And you're thinking, this story is going nowhere, and that may be true.

Welcome to my blog! It took a bit longer to get around to this than I expected, but I'll try to add entries quite frequently. Yesterday I visited the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang. The Centre was established after the Thai government banned teak logging in the 90s, leaving lots of elephants and trainers (mahouts) out of work. They have about 50 elephants of all sizes (although they are obviously all elephant-sized).

The highlight of the day was a one-hour elephant ride through the surrounding forest, only me, the mahout, and what turned out to be a rather peckish elephant called Moon-Kah. Apparently grown elephants (and Moon-Kah was that) eat about 250 kg of food every day. How do they find time for anything else, I wondered. As I soon discovered, they don't. Moon-Kah stopped every couple of minutes to snack on weeds and shrubs which he yanked out, roots and all, with his trunk and stuck in his mouth. Whenever the mahout felt that the elephant lingered for too long, he poked the elephant's ear with his iron-tipped mahout staff. Moon-Kah responded not only with grumpy snorts and ear-flapping, but also by breaking wind quite loudly. I found this terribly funny, but the mahout didn't, so I kept my mirth to myself. (It's not that he didn't have a sense of humour, he did find other things - particularly my large, white feet, which he stole glances at through the corner of his eye - worthy of a smirk.)

We also saw a kingfisher. The bird, not the beer.