www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgPUC6aZPWQ

This was our deck….

And this lovely surprise was in our tub after dinner our first night.

It just so happened that the 3 days we spent in the Golden Triangle coincided with the annual King’s Court Elephant Polo tournament! How exciting for us! We decided to drop by and see what it was all about. Pretty odd!

After polo, we stopped over to see the new baby elephant in town. This little girl is about a year and a half old. We took some time to feed her some bananas and take some pictures.

Jeremy is in heaven!

After our ride back to the “camp”, we had a nice lunch and then had to get dressed up for our mahout training. A mahout is an elephant trainer. We had to put on our special outfit and then head over to the elephant camp to go through some training and then take our elephants out into the jungle.

Looking quite spiffy! Luckily they gave us one of these shirts to take home as a souvenir!

Here we are mid-ride. You actually sit right up on top of the elephants head. It was actually pretty comfortable (except for the next day when I couldn’t walk). My elephant was Yuki. She was a film star in Japan for a while. Jeremy was on Boun-Maa. Both females.

The toughest part was getting on and off the elephant. Besides that it was pretty simple. They taught us 6 or 7 commands to use with them. Mine had a habit of eating every single thing it walked past, but besides that she listened pretty well!

Here we are after we finished bathing them. All I could think about was bathing myself in our gorgeous tub!

You can see one of the tents in the background. When we got back from dinner later that night, we had Mahout Trainer certificates in our room for us. So, if you are ever looking for a certified elephant driver, call one of us.

This spot is the greatest vantage point of the Golden Triangle…where 3 countries (Laos, Thailand and Burma) all meet. It is called the Golden Triangle because gold was always used in the buying and selling of opium, which was grown very heavily in this area. The day before we visited the Hall of Opium, a museum all about opium (no samples).

Here we are at a local food market, which the video with highlight better!

Local transportation to the next Wat (Temple).

Here we are in front of the Buddha at the Temple. As you can see below, we had one of the monks offer up a prayer for us at wishing us good luck in our marriage. He gave each of us a special bracelet that we have to wear for at least 3 days. He could only drop mine in my hand, as monks are not allowed to touch women.

Back to our hotel for Spa Time! Let’s hope Jeremy knows how to drive this thing!

Videos coming soon!

Chiang Rai 68 °F ]]> http://www.jeremyschneiderman.com/2010/03/29/chiang-rai-and-the-golden-triangle/feed/ 2 19.8737421 99.723267319.873742199.7232673 http://www.jeremyschneiderman.com/2010/03/29/part-2-chiang-rai-and-the-golden-triangle-video-highlights/ http://www.jeremyschneiderman.com/2010/03/29/part-2-chiang-rai-and-the-golden-triangle-video-highlights/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:00:02 +0000 Lauren and Jeremy http://www.jeremyschneiderman.com/?p=1104 We had way too much good footage for just one video from Chiang Rai so we decided to send you another.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-XLtjIRzhA

More good stuff coming soon….Don’t forget to leave us some comments!