For the last two days at Chiang Mai, the internet decided it didn’t want to work properly. This was very unfortuate since my mother and I had all kinds of adventures.

The day after all of our shopping, we had to wake up at 5:00 AM to go to the “Flight of the Gibbon”. The Flight of the Gibbon is a series of zip lines setup in the mountain jungles of Chiang Mai. This place was one of the events for the “Amazing Race - Asia”. I still am not sure what a Gibbon is, but I assume it is some kind of monkey.

The site was significantly colder than what I expected in Thailand. Up in the mountains, the morning temperature had to be around 50. A long sleeve shirt was required.

Flight of the Gibbon Sign

Zip lining

Two german lawyers with IT support

Mom all geared up

There are some fantastic videos of us zipping between trees. I have a great first person perspective video of being lowered rapidly upside down to the forest ground 50 ft below. The video has a great ending where I am hit in the head by my mother when she comes down.

The next day, we went to ride an elephant. We had debated whether or not to do it. The tourist office we were working with wanted to charge us 3800 Baht ($120) for an one hour elephant ride. But since there are no American elephants, we decided it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and forked over the money.

Before the ride, we were forced to watch a live one hour elephant show that involve the following:

1) Elephants spinning their trunks

2) Elephants playing very bad soccer (They really need to work on their accuracy.)

3) Elephants painting pictures (Really all they did was move their trunk according to how the trainer pulled their ear.

I would have probably enjoyed the show more if I had been their by choice.

The elephant ride was fun. We took an elephant basically up a mud covered slope and then back down and through a stream.

Riding an elephant

But the most awesome activity we had in Chiang Mai came after the elephant ride. The riding finished up around 1PM so we still had most of the day. Our driver suggested that we go to “Tiger Kingdom”. Tiger Kingom is a place you can go to hang out with real life tigers. Now most people come to pet the baby tigers (at a rate of $20 for 15 minutes). I, however, am a much more sauve shopper. I choose to spend $10 to spend 20 minutes with the adult tigers. To compare the deal, you need to calculate the amount of tiger mass * minutes per dollar (Kg s / $ units). My approach was approximately 100 more efficienent than playing with the tiger babies. An adult tiger can weigh up to 250 kg (600 lbs).

Before I went into the enclosure with the tigers, I got to watch a tiger maul a coconut with its teeth. I was pretty nervous getting into the enclosure with the tigers (There were six in the enclosure). Tigers behave a lot like house cats, except that they maul you rather than scratch you when you annoy them.

It did not help that the trainers in the enclosure felt a need to annoy the cats. I guess they prefer an agitated tiger to a sleepy mellow one.

First time touching a tiger