Then I fell in love with Ngam Ta

Oh  Ngam Ta, it's so big! 

They say Thailand is a pretty exotic and erotic place – and it was just a few days into our Thailand adventure that I temporarily forgot all about Darling alas, and had a heady lesbian encounter with an Asian elephant called Ngam Ta. I had a hosepipe and soap and I gave Ngam Ta an all over rub which pretty much changed my life. Her skin was rough and exciting, her ears flapped evocatively and her trunk, oh it was so big! Sorry Darling.

We were in the Khao Sok National Park about three hours from Phuket. A glorious, wild, proverbially impenetrable 600 km sq tropical rainforest that has been long conserved and is largely untouched. It's wet and wild, hot and heady. It rains for an hour then everything steams out and up and off - and then the sun breaks out along with sweet birdsong, and orchids release their charming scent. Then it rains again for a while and it happens all over again, and again.

Sexy rainforest

 Think warm rain, great soaring jungle-clad hills with limestone faces, tropical palms, dripping vines, ropes and tendrils, and a green canopy of creepers that drapes itself all sexily over ancient trees. Think spider lilies and trumpet-shaped flowers and a thousand different kinds of ginger plants, whose flowers must be the epitome of plant porn. Let’s face it, Khao Sok rainforest is the kind of place you’re going to have an affair if you were ever going to have one, if you know what I mean. I mean if one just came along...

Deep in da jungle

like Ngam Ta.
Ok, so we were staying at Elephant Hills, at their jungle camp in the park, a private concession.  They do a fabulous combo of jungle-experience-in-Khao Sok-with-floating-hotel-experience-on Cheow-Larn-Lake. It’s a bucket list trip pardon the corny cliché. The elephant thingy is option but if you do visit then please give Ngam Ta a special rub from me.

Gals a-mud wrestling 

I must say I don’t approve of zoo elephants, caged elephants, riding elephants or domesticating elephants. But in Thailand the elephants have been largely domesticated for hundreds of years – and this pretty little harem of eleven female elephants, mainly in their 40's, have been retired from the logging industry and put out to pasture at last. They were plainly enjoying themselves – what with a jungle right there and a pool and nice people feeding you and rubbing you, and a mahout (handler) that loves you so. There are two much younger females who have recently joined the group, possibly preventing them from going to the logging industry and they were pretty frisky, but for the most part washing a tame elephant is a seriously lekker thing to do. Oh Ngam Ta, baby!

 

Naughty Ngam Ta likes a good bath and a pole scratch, yeah