Getting to Chiang Mai from Siem Reap took a while. We took an airplane to Bangkok and spent the night in a hotel inside the airport. Then we took another plane to Chiang Mai. Then, we took an Uber to a cafe and had breakfast. After that, we took another Uber to a park by our Airb&b and played for a while because our house wasn’t ready. When we got to our house they were setting up a Christmas tree for us! It was so pretty.

The first time I got to be close to an elephant was at an elephant sanctuary. They taught us how to make elephant medicine. The elephants have to eat a medicine ball everyday for their bellies because they don’t walk as much as wild elephants. There was a very playful baby elephant there. He was a cheeky guy. We had to watch out for him. We met his mom too. There was an old lady elephant there that lost one of her babies to a snakebite a long time ago. Now, when she sees a baby elephant laying down, she nudges them to try to get them up. It was sad.

The Karen Hill Tribe are elephant keepers and have been for a long time. We got to visit them and hang out with a bunch of their elephants. One of them was very pregnant. Elephants are pregnant for two years! That’s a very long time and a very big baby. Two elephants kissed me. It was awesome but slimy. We fed them, hiked with them, and even washed them. I liked this time with elephants even more than the other one.

The temples in Thailand are mostly Buddhist. They were very fancy. I think Thailand likes fancy things. All the temples were shiny with lots of gold. One temple was very blue. It had blue dragons guarding it. It had gold all over too. There was one temple that was completely white. There were koi fish in the pond in front of it. Inside, it had a Pikachu, Transformers, Batman, and Spiderman painted on the wall. It was supposed to be a warning about worshipping the wrong things. I don’t think it was working because everyone was very excited about it. There was a completely gold temple right next to it.

Outside our house, there were baby pigeons. We could see them right out Mom’s bedroom window. There were two babies, one had pink skin and one had black skin. When they got their feathers, you couldn’t really tell anymore. They were cute. The mom and dad both sat on the nest at different times. The dad would sit on the nest during the day and the mom sat on it at night. The babies were noisy when they were hungry.

The food in Thailand was good. The curry was spicy, but it was a good spicy. I really like the flavors. The mango sticky rice was my favorite thing we had. It was sweet. There was a lot of food that was mostly rice and noodles. We tried pizza there and it was pretty good.

I would like to go back to Thailand and see more temples and see elephants again. It was very different from the other countries we’ve been to. It felt fancier. I liked Thailand.