My Egg Noodles

I’ve come to the conclusion that getting up at the break of dawn is worth every second of missed sleep in order to miss the hottest part of the day, as my forearms and the back of my neck are getting more sore by the day; not that I’m complaining thou! It’s just getting a little uncomfortable.

So another early start, getting the motorbike back onto a little boat leaving 4k islands and heading over to the main land was easy peasy, although cost double what it cost to get it here :)

Within a couple of hours we arrived at the Kingfisher Eco-Lodge in Kiet Nong. This is the first time I’ve stayed in an Eco-Lodge and I liked what I saw (from a business perspective)… Basically you set up a hotel in the middle of nowhere, offer little entertainment such as no TV’s and your pretty much guaranteed that the guests will spend their spare time in your bar/restaurant, where are you can charge highly inflated rates!

Okay, it wasn’t that bad… in fact, it’s the nicest place we have stayed during our trip, and the rates were not as bad as the owner could have got away with.

The closest you’ll get to Africa in Asia

I really did feel like I was on an African safari, due to the heaps of wildlife all around us. While sipping a fresh lime juice on the impressive upper viewing deck, we saw elephants, cows and buffalos freely roaming the fields. It was an impressive sight.

After having a walk around the town and being greeted by the friendly locals with “sabidee” (hello) everywhere we turned, we had an excellent dinner consisting of Laap, BBQ fish and a veggie soup – which was perfect.

On the way back to our room, I noticed 2 buffalos, around 2 feet away from me beside the walk path. I was just so wowed by the experience that I’d rank it as one of the best experiences I’ve had so far on this trip. We stood there for a few minutes just staring at the 2 buffalos staring at us wondering what we were doing.

The next day we had booked up a guided jungle elephant safari tour- trekking through thick jungle on the back of an elephant. I was a bit skeptical as I had done an elephant trek on my first visit to Thailand in Chiang Mai. And It was horrible. It felt more like an elephant factory due to the mahouts consistently beating the elephants… as if the elephants had clearly had enough of ferry tourists from a to b hundreds of times per month. Fortunately, this trip was nothing like my experience in Chiang Mai.

There were 9 of us; myself, the missus, 2 French tourists, a guide who spoke excellent English, 3 mahouts and 3 female elephants. We spent the morning going though little towns, alongside rice paddies and into think jungle.

I got to admit, it’s pretty scary sitting on the top of an elephant as you are positioned a lot higher up than you imagine – and with the elephants having to go up and down water streams and small steep hills, we were often hanging onto the side of our seats wondering if we were going to fall out. Good fun.

We stopped to have lunch, and let the elephants roam around for an hour or so. Then we watched the elephants bath in a shallow river before making our way back to the elephant. It was an exhausting day, but one that I’ll always remember.