The day after my birthday, we took the night train to the Thai/Laos border and broke a record for the most number of transportation categories in one day. We crossed the second Friendship bridge of our trip (such a good metaphor for Friendship-a bridge) and rode the 24 km to Vientiane on the back of a pick-up like vehicle that was based on a motorcycle chassis (harder to explain than ride on). It was apparent immediately the moment we crossed the bridge that we had changed "worlds." Laos reminded me of many African countries we visited and in some ways, I realized I felt more comfortable amidst the potholed roads, chaos, and dust. There are many similarities between Thailand and Laos and I suspect many subtle differences as well. Much like Canada and the U.S., these differences are much more apparent once you've lived in both countries.

Vientiane is much more laid back than Bangkok and it has a much more managable scale. In our four day visit, we saw the major sights and had lots of time for Laos massage as well. We visited many wats. One wat had over 10,000 Buddha statues and another was famous for it's mosiac finish.

We flew to Chiang Mai from Udon Thani just in time for the third place World Cup game. Mcdonalds in Thailand celebrated the World Cup with a new type of "burger." It looks like a soccer ball and tastes, as Liz says, "very Asian." Its bun is made of sticky rice and its burger is two pork patties in a sweet and sour sauce. In the name of the World Cup, I had to try one and it was most unique for Mcdonalds.

We watched the World Cup final in a progressive dinner style in three restaurants moving continent to continent in dining as the game progressed. I'm happy to report that a team I was cheering for-finally won a game. I think restaurant and bar owners around the world are mourning the finish of the World Cup.

With the World Cup closed, we moved onto the Thai jungle to begin our work with elephants. Our first morning we were introduced to the two "babies." Ging Mai who is seven months old and Hope who is 18 months old. The two young elephants came running to greet us when we emerged from the van. How could I not do anything to melt when the Ging Mai reaches out with his trunk and gives me a kiss on the cheek? We helped out with bathing, feeding, and walking the babies. What an amazing experience to be sharing a living space with two elephants? I am really lost for words (for a change).

Though most fell immediately in love with Ging Mai, I reserved by heart for Hope. He's a bit of a bully these days and likes to push newcomers around. We carry nails to convince him that humans "hurt" when he pushes too hard-an elephant tough love. He and I reached an agreement and got along quite well until I was feeding him at bedtime. Between bottles, he took an unexpectly lunge and knocked me and the bottle of milk/rice/banana mixture over. Hope's mother was killed in a jungle fire and Ging Mai's mother was killed by villagers. Lek, the founder of the Elephant Nature Park, rescued them both.

Lek, who was given a National Geographic "Hero for the Planet" award has given her life over to Thailand's elephants. She's raising the two orphans. She's rescued six adult elephants from cruelity and has mountain haven for them. Lek answers the call to attend to any sick elephant anywhere in Northern Thailand and she works tirelessly on many other projects. She works 18 hour days and gets up to feed the babies most nights. She receives death threats because she is asking the logging and tourist industries to face the reality of what they are doing to elephants. Lek is an inspiration and I feel privileged to be spending this time working on some of her projects.

After spending two days with the babies (who aren't so small-Hope weighs about 600 pounds), we went "up the mountain" to elephant camp. We met the six rescued elephants at the river side. We gave them a good scrubbing and shampoo in the river-mine helped alot by squirting her back and me with her trunk. After the bath, the mahouts (the elephant handlers) gave the command for the elphants to get down and we climbed aboard. We each rode alone on the neck of the elephant. No harness, no seat, no saddle-just me and Mai Perl.

Mai Perl is 89 years old and a wonderful grandmother. She walks with a graceful lilt and I felt like I'd always belonged on her back. I was awestruck as we rode along the mountain path, higher and higher into the Thai jungle. Mai Perl would stop now and then to pull up her favorite green morsels. It was a bit nervewracking when her vegetative wants was down a steep hill and I looked 30 feet into the abyss below her trunk.

I arrived at the jungle camp safe and in a cosmic high. A truly amazing experience once again. We cut tall corn like plants for the ellies to eat and then wondered up the mountain to spend the night grazing (elephants eat 20 hours per day consuming 150-300 kilograms of food). The next morning we climbed high up the ridge to find the elephants to ride them back to camp for more grass and for some of the elephants to receive medical treatments.

That afternoon, we went looking for dung beetles. The great dung beetle hunt was one fo those experiences that I was glad about having once it was over. We left jungle camp following one of the mahouts. His exertion level appeared to match that of a leisurely Sunday afternoon stroll while the rest of us panted like dogs who'd played fetch too long. The search for elephant dung (poop, shit, ca-ca) piles that were just the right age to house a dung beetle (not too new, green, soft, and smelly, not too old, yellow and loose) impelled us up ridge after ridge. While our mahout never broke a sweat, we were drenched and dripping instantly in the humidity of late afternoon. Even Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound, would have been proud of the challenge-swifter, higher, faster-in pursuit, not of sensible self-denial- but of a black, hard-bodied shit eating beetle-our dinner.

When the appropriately aged dung pile was found, the green mass was thrown aside aside revealing a two inch hole. With hoe in hand, hte mahout dug a three foot hole chasing the beetle. About every second hole revealed a beetle and much sadness descended on our group when the hole was empty because it appeared that we couldn't return to the hut until we captured the requiaite number of dinner morsels. Turning back wasn't an option either as evrey square meter of Thai jungle looks like other square meter. It is very easy to become discombobulated (I love that word) and lose the way.

Based on exertion to calories earned ratio, we didn't have a very successful mission. After we returned to camp with only five beetle, the other mahouts went out and brought back more plus some frogs and jungle crabs as well. They fried up the beetles. What did they taste like? Well-a little like chicken. I'm not kidding. Their meat actually had more of a meat consistency that other insects I've eaten-though Liz did have the kindness to wait until after the meal was finished to say "you are what you eat and those beetles had the consistency of dung." Thus another eating adventure closed....bring on the scorpions.

We're off to visit a park tomorrow and witness some elephant abuse first hand and then up to the mountains again to provide medical care to hilltribe elephants and people.

Tablu is the Karen word for Hello and Thank-you and Good Luck. The Karen are a hilltribe people who live in the Northern part of Thailand. They orginated in Myanmar (Burma) but many refugeed in Thailand to escape their oppression in their homeland.

I had the amzing fortune of spending several nights in three differnt Karen villages during a program called "Jumbo Express." Lek, the founder of Elephant Nature Park, believes that for elephants to be cared for well, their mahouts and owners must be cared for as well. Once a month, Lek dispatches volunteers and staff to visit different villages and provide medical care to villagers, their elephants and their stock animals. We brought medications, food, and other supplies to be distributed.

The first village we visited was high in the mountains. It was the village of "Ging Mai," the young orphan elephant. We stayed with his former owner in a raised Teak house. Our arrival was clearly an event in the village with kids, dogs, and folks coming to check us out. We prepared small packets of Tylenol, cough syrup, stomach settler, and skin cream for dispersal-trying to remember-brown for cough, pink for fever.

After dinner, folks started to arrive enmass. We cleaned wounds, cleaned ears, and received many thanks. As darkness fell and the fireflies started their nightly dance in the jungle, some villagers moved into a circle surrounding us on the floor. They spoke Karen, our guide spoke Thai, we spoke English and two other volunteers spoke Danish. The villagers asked us to sing a song-we quickly replied with Old McDonald's farm. They answered with a Karen Catholic spiritual. Different than most Thai who are Buddhist, the Karen are Catholic.

The singing went back and forth, each group clapping for the other. At one point, a Karen woman began to sing "Frere Jacque." We all grinned at each other and all began to sing the song in all the languages we knew. English, Danish, Thai and French blended into an international harmony and a magic moment of meeting each other deeply through music. We finished singing the song all together in a second language to French-and marvelled at the universality of the song.

The next day we traveled up the road to Hope's village. Here we repeated our distribution and noticed that villages only moments apart by road, could be far apart in access to resources. The second village had the lassitude and pallor of poverity hanging over it and I appreciated that Lek sees that we need to care for both the elephant and the village.

A few days later, we left for another Jumbo Express. Here I learned that you can easily get into trouble when you say the Thai greeting well enough that people think I can speak Thai. We visited the village of the woman who is the cook at Lek's farm. We brought food parcels to five older folks who were living with different kinds of disabilities. I had the pleasure of introducing a 75 year old woman who was blind to the concept of a juicebox. I also shared a conversation with a 92 year old Karen woman in which we each spoke our own languages but connected with our hearts and souls beyond the indecipherable words. At each household, we shared a prayer of thanks with the recipients.

We also had the job of deworming all of the pigs in the village. The vet quickly taught me how to size a pig: lidden, middle, or big and the corresponding amount of dewormer to stir into their slop. Being a researcher, I thought of it as pigs on a "Likert" scale: just born, piglet, large piglet, small pig, medium pig, large pig, very big pig, mother of all pigs.

A villager escorted us to each pig sty in the village-a really unique way to see different homes and gardens. As always in such situations, communication can be humourous. The word for pig in Thai is "moo." The word for pig in Karen is "duck." Already, you can see the challenge. So, I'm standing the road heading to the next house when a man roars up on his motorcycle.

He says "I have three ducks."

I say "we are vaccinating the chickens after dinner. I don't know if we are vaccinating ducks."

He says while holding up three fingers on one hand and indicating a middle sized pig between his hands, "I have three ducks."

I say with raised eyebrows, "Ducks? This medicine is for pigs."

I resort to the universal language of Old Mcdonald's Farm once again and begin to make "oink oink" here and "snort snort" there while pointing to the white powder trying to ensure that the correct animal was going to receive the medication.

The man got an excited look on his face and said-yes-"three ducks worth."

Later that night, while retelling my story, I finally learned about the Karen word for pig.

After dinner, we began our second job-vaccinating chickens. I had no idea that chickens got vaccinated. Kristen and I formed one team. She was delivering the Newcastle vaccine by introducing small droplets of vaccine into the chicks and chicken's eyes. Do you know how difficult it can be to get a chicken to open its eye once again after the first drop? It's tough.

My job was to inject adult chickens with Cholera vaccine. Fortunately, I was experienced at giving shots into bellies (my own mainly) so I was able to be immediately deputized as an honourary veteranarian. Once again, I invite you to imagine the challenge of placing a needle in a chicken abdominal muscles in darkness lit only by a dim flashlight while the chicken is making quite a fuss. The rooster were especially pissy and unhappy at the prospect.

With pigs and chickens taken care of, the next day we headed to an elephant camp that can only be reached on foot, by elephant or by river. We took the river route using a 30 foot bamboo raft. It was a stretch of river unseen by tourists and our raft polers built the raft the morning we set off. It was a reminder of Huck Finn; a bamboo raft, a river thickened by the rainy season, and a group of intrepid elephant healers. The raft floated just below the rusty muddy water and plowed through waves rather than floated over them. The river had class two and three rapids and had plenty of rocks to manoever the raft around and over. We stood upright on the raft, balancing ourselves, trying not to be pitched into the water. Our gear hung like jack fruits from a tripod mounted on the raft-the only dry spot on the raft. The other raft tipped at one point sending people and supplies into the water. All were quickly rescued, the raft patched, and we were underway once more.

Over the two days on the river, we stopped and provided medicine to elephants and their mahouts. I thought giving an injection to a chicken was hard, you should try giving one to an elephant!!!

I also spent a few more days on the farm with baby elephants. I admit, I'm in love. Hope and Ging Mai have stolen my heart with their trucks. I felt very close to my brother who is a new father. Here at the farm, I had the experience of being parent to the baby elephants. I had to wake up during the night when the elephants were being fed, I had elephant drool all over my clothes, and I had to spend hours watching and celebrating their every move and achievement. "Look, Ging Mai just picked up a piece of Bamboo." "Wow, Hope just squirted me with water during our bath," (when an elephant gets a bath-everyone gets a bath).

I put my experiential education background to work with the baby elephants. After learning that it is good for them to have new and novel things to play with, I began to design elephant initiatives by sculpting with logs, tires, ropes, and used water bottles. Ging Mai especially, loved to solve the puzzle of getting the soccer ball out from under the tire. Hope liked to push the sculpture down so that I would build it back up again.

Elephants are very social animals. In the wild, their herd is their family. For orphan elephants, their human caregivers become their herd. This past two weeks have been very precious to me as I got to be close to both big and small elephants and to be a part of their family. I am reminded of my great love of animals and the joy of sharing time with them. It is tempting to stay and watch Hope and Ging Mai grow-up.

Instead, I'm heading off to Vietnam for three weeks. I wish Lek the best with her project and thank her for the privilege of living closely with elephants and villagers. I hope to return to do it again one day.