Riding elephants

You know how something can sound like an amazing idea but the second you actually start doing it you have second thoughts and realize that it's one of the most stupid things you have ever come up with?  For me riding an elephant was such an endeavor.  

Since I really wanted to ride an elephant and we had guests in town, we went out to the Kuala Gandah Elephant Sanctuary, which is home to orphaned, handicapped, and general nuisance elephants from Malaysia and various countries around South East Asia.  It's about an hour and fifteen minutes outside of KL.  If you are one of the first 100 people there you can ride the elephants.  If not you can still feed them and bathe with the littler ones in the river.

You can buy peanuts from the center to feed the elephants, but since they get a lot of peanuts you'll be more popular if you stop along the way there and buy some fruit.  We brought a bunch of bananas and the elephants seemed pretty happy to have them--happy enough to try and steal them from each other.

In theory I still think riding an elephant sounds fun.  However, the way we did it would probably never be allowed in the US for liability reasons (the fact that this is the first thing that I thought about makes me kind of regret having gone to law school).  Just look at this:

In case you can't tell from the picture, there is one rope tied around the elephant's neck in the front, and everyone was just supposed to hold onto the waist of the person in front of them.  As far as Asian elephants go, the one above was pretty big.  Had it really acted up we would have been on the ground and smooshed in a hot second.  As you can somewhat see from the body-less arm in the bottom right hand corner of the picture, this was taken just after the elephant decided that balancing on two feet would be more fun that walking around with four people on its back.  Needless to say, the next time I get on an elephant it will have a howdah on its back.