Travel Blogging II

Dateline: Ko Semui, Thailand. Third world beach resort communities all look a lot alike – an interesting mix of poverty and luxury, lush vegetation and decaying buildings. The same backpackers hanging around and zipping along on rented motorbikes. The locals here are nice, not in-your-face at all.

We did a couple of things here we’ve not done before. We rode an elephant, it is not particularly comfortable but interesting as blazes. You can see why the colonial Brits used them for tiger hunting, you sit up high and can see some distance. I’m guessing elephants are not afraid of tigers and that would help too. We also rode an ox cart w/o springs and could see right away why the smart pioneers headed west in the U.S. used ox teams instead of horses. They are slow but powerful and can live off the land.

We saw trained monkeys harvest coconuts. They only train the male monkeys as if they try to train males and females together they fool around too much. I didn’t learn why the cannot train the female monkeys separately, maybe a strength issue. It does suggest that perhaps human junior high and high schools should be sex-segregated. All trained monkeys are male and all trained elephants are female. Go figure.

Tomorrow we do our first lecture of this trip, I look forward to it.