Happy Pimai Lao (with Elephants)

     Another backlog of posts to write and increasingly short times in which to do so.  We're a few hundred kilometers away from Luang Prabang in a town called Nong Khiaw on the Nam Ou river but are leaving tomorrow for an even more remote village farther downstream that probably doesn't have wifi and may not even have electricity.  This would have been posted late last night if five paragraphs or so hadn't randomly been deleted.
      Being in a bungalow that had less of an 'inside' and 'outside' and more of an 'outside' and 'outside with a few partitions' meant that the light came in and woke me up early.  An unappetizingly eggy breakfast started at seven and at eight fifteen we went with Mae Bou Nam's mahout Pang to find her.  It was a fight through the jungle once we left the dirt road and I didn't see her until she was only a few feet away.  Pang brought her back to the road and cleaned the dirt and leaves from her back with a handful of leafy branches.  Mae Bou Nam was distracted by the bamboo shoots at the side of the road that we couldn't stop picking for her.  My dad rode on her neck for the last fifteen minutes or so before we arrived back at the buildings.
 
      He took her past the buildings to where the boats had pulled up the day before and she walked in for a swim and drink.  The other three joined her, and she and her special friend the twenty-one-year-old trumpeted when they saw eachother.  Her friend loved to swim and they went off a little ways together to duck down under the water and to scoop water into their trunks.  With only the tops of their heads emerging from the water they looked like some prehistoric aquatic animal.

        Too soon for them they were coaxed out of the water to go for a loop around one of the hills.  The path wasn't wide enough to walk two abreast but the elephants walked with exquisite balance, placing each foot directly in front of the last.  Our companions Perrine, Annemarys, and Inara rode at first and then my mother and I traded places with the latter two.  I rode Mae Do again and, once, when she stopped to eat something, I would have slipped had her mahout Sen not been sitting behind me. 
      Lunch was same same no different.  Meals are a bit of an ordeal because Annemarys is the only one of the girls to attempt to make the conversation in English, so much of the time they chatter on while we sit there wishing we had our own private language.  The veggie option was fish soup that became fish soup with most of the fish picked out when we explained that fish is meat to us.  Unfortunately I only discovered this when I reached the bottom of my bowl and found a scale.
     A Danish family arrived that afternoon and they got to spend it with the elephants.  Instead we walked to the nursery and sat on the tilting dock across from the to mother/son pairs on the other side of the inlet.  Both sons are about a year and a half old, and only have as much time again before they are separated from their mothers.  
 
      The mothers can get aggressive with eachother and so were separated by a bit of water and some trees but they didn't seem interested in one another.  After swimming and drinking for some time their mahouts had them come out and, immediately, the pair on the left began rolling in the dirt and spraying dirt over their backs. Soon they were hidden a cloud.  Their mahout apparently decided that they were too dirt and had them go back for another swim, but when they came out again they only repeated the process.  

       Once the dust settled for the last time the elephants snacked from the bamboo and grasses in the  area.  A boat came to take the girls back and then again for us. 
      With the Danes at dinner too the conversation stayed understandable and we found out that Annemarys, Perrine, and Inara are travelling for six months in South-East Asia as part of a project to make a guidebook of Eco-friendly socially-responsible organizations.  They have a list of places they need to visit and make notes about but in between stops they can go wherever they like.  The guidebook will only be written in French and not even started until they get home at the end of June but for these six months they only need to give updates and take notes.
       Another early morning to go get Our Elephant for the last time.  This time I rode her back.  It was a relief not to have to keep my eyes peeled for the teacup-sized daddy longlegs that scurry across the road.  When we emerged from the jungle Pang out his hand on his heart, turned to us, and said,  'Hoi hoc Mae Bou Nam.  That means, I love Mae Bou Nam'.  In the best cases, mahouts are born about the same time as their elephants and they grow up together.  Elephants live about as long as humans and the bond between them can every strong. 
      The Danes got to spend time with the elephants again and we hiked to see the Buddha footprint.  Fifty minutes scrambling through the jungle later we arrived at a clearing with several abandoned structures in it that had once been used for Buddhist monks to stay and pray.  Lah, our guide, chatted with us for a long time about different things in his country.  Weddings and monks were the focus, and he explained how the monks area becoming careful who they accept because many people become a monk for a few months because they want to learn English or study or because there is something going on at home and not because of a devotion to religion.  After some time he cried out that he had forgotten the tea, and pulled out two large thermoses and a half a dozen cups that he had lugged the whole way.
       A cup of tea later two men from the lodge arrived with a boat and we walked to the lake, stopping at the Buddha's footprint.  Under a wooden roof there was a large somewhat foot shaped depression in the ground.  Originally in the stone the edges had been covered in concrete to make it nicer and a lopsided gold Buddha placed on an altar next to it.
 

       Lunch was early and same same.  We spent some time before it in the small museum with posters telling about the differences between Asian and African elephants.  The boat came to take us to the road to meet a tuk tuk a little after noon and Lah hurried us away from our goodbyes with the elephants because 'The tuk tuk was waiting'.  It wasn't.  Afraid we would miss the bus, we tried to communicate to the boat driver to go back to the center and have Lah call and he may have been doing that when the tuk tuk arrived, fifteen minutes late.  We still made it in time and were able to get seats.  This time we could almost have each had our own row.  
       It was even dustier on our way back, and it didn't take long for my black shirt to become reddish brown and my seat to be covered in dirt thick enough for me to write in.  It was too bumpy to read and almost too bumpy to sleep and too noisy to listen to music and we couldn't have arrived soon enough.  In  celebration of the new year a few feet out of town a group of laughing girls threw buckets of water at the bus and with the open windows it was very startling, but probably the one and only highlight of the ride.