Jonathan really wanted to ride elephants in Thailand, but I was concerned about the ethical issues surrounding this issue. I googled "ethical elephant riding Thailand" before we left and found Baan Chang Elephant Park, an organization outside the city of Chiang Mai that rescues circus elephants and other abused elephants. Of course no elephant park is perfect, and I will talk more about specifics in a later post, but I felt more comfortable visiting an elephant park that also provided an educational benefit to the tourists and offered bareback riding rather than a chair strapped to the elephant's back.
On our last morning in Cambodia, we woke up at 4 a.m. to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. As you can see in the (unedited!) photo above, the view was well worth the lack of sleep.
The last few days of our trip were reserved for relaxation at the beach. In addition to swimming and snorkeling, we spent an afternoon at a Thai cooking class learning to make six different dishes. We're already planning to make these spring rolls for our Christmas dinner this year! Yum yum.
I took about 80 photos of this sunset at Railay Beach (unfortunately about 78 of them had someone standing in the way ... grr). It just kept getting better!
I mentioned above that we visited Bangkok only briefly. To be honest, I had little to no desire to spend any time in the city, but I did want to try some of the famed street food. I didn't find any scorpion, but we did buy a few skewers from this cart outside Wat Saket, and they were delicious. I don't actually know what any of the ingredients were (I thought the one I picked was potatoes, but it was definitely some type of meat), but neither of us got sick, so no harm done. :)
And you get a bonus photo to explain why we spent time in Bangkok at all: So Jonathan could get a custom-made suit! You can get a quality custom-made suit in Thailand for about one-third of the price of a custom suit in the U.S. (or even cheaper if you don't care so much about the quality), which Jonathan was very excited about leading up to the trip. And I didn't mind, because I got to sit in the air conditioned shop and do some light reading. ;)
Have you ever been to Southeast Asia? What are your feelings on elephant riding and/or other types of animal tourism?
Linking up with Darci, April, Christina and Natasha for FIVE on Friday; Clare for Five Things Friday; Karli for Oh Hey, Friday!; and Bonnie Rose for Travel Tuesday.
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