An elephant of a day

This morning we woke up early to go on an elephant back safari. While we didn't see very many animals on our 1.5 hour safari, it was still an enjoyable experience to ride on the back of an elephant through a jungle. The only animals we saw were deer, wild boars, and chickens, and a fish-eating crocodile (different than a normal crocodile). Our elephant also had some problems going up and down hills and through water - usually we stopped at some crazy angle and at least two of us felt like we were going to fall out of the basket on the hills. Our guide got some nice pictures of us on our elephant - she was definitely the prettiest one in the bunch of them.

Labiba really enjoyed the elephant ride, and this was about the only type of picture we could take while actually on the elephants.

After the elephant-back safari, we went to bathe with elephants. The elephants basically sprayed us with water a few times then dumped us in the water. The water was about a foot and a half deep, so being dropped from any height was not the most pleasant experience ever, but the first part of the elephant bath made up for the drop into the water.

Here are some of the pictures from that event - there's also a video so you can get the full experience.

After bathing with the elephants we ate some lunch. We have discovered that our hostel loves to cook with tomatoes or carrots, even if a dish does not generally include any tomatoes or carrots. For example, this morning we ate egg and carrot omelets for breakfast. The sandwiches we ate for lunch had tomatoes and carrots on them, as well as coleslaw - on a cheese sandwich. 

After lunch we were scheduled to go on a jungle safari by jeep. Our new friend followed us about 1km to the national park. This should be a lesson to anyone - do not feed the stray dogs unless you want them to follow you EVERYWHERE. 

To get to our jeep for the safari, we had to climb down a rock wall that had been reinforced with some metal   chicken wire stuff. This made the rock wall much more difficult to climb down than it would have been otherwise. After we climbed down the rock wall, we crossed a river via canoe. We were also told by our guide about the crocodiles in the river that "like to eat people, especially white people". Very comforting. After crossing the river, we got to our jeep. We drove around for a few hours without much success in finding many animals. We saw more deer and wild boars, and were searching for a rhino when we took our mid-way break at a crocodile breeding center. There were a whole lot of crocodiles. The only relatively cute ones were in the "nursery pool" where the baby crocodiles live. 

After the crocodile breeding center, we finally found our rhinos. They're one horned rhinos and we found a group of three of them. They were very nice and ate a lot of grass. Rhinos also kind of remind me of dinosaurs. I think I'll have to read the wikipedia article about them once I have good internet.

After finding the rhinos we drove around for about another hour and did not see any more animals besides two peacocks flying around in trees. The long safari did not provide the most comfortable seat in the world, so we have been resting for the rest of the night. Tomorrow we leave to go back to Kathmandu where we'll be staying at the same hostel we stayed at upon arriving in Nepal. I'm so excited to get back there for the delicious food and the wonderful tea at every meal.