Day 6- Elephants

So today Katie and I rode elephants!! We took the hostel's truck to an elephant camp where we first rode on the back of an elephant named An. We sat in the weird chair thing and got to wear the traditional pointy hat things, it was so much fun though. It really felt like we had gone back in time. Of course my hat fell off after we went past some branches, ooops.
After that we pet the elephants some and then walked to the village nearby. It was right by the Mekong River which we took a boat over to visit the Pak Ou Caves. The caves had thousands of Buddha statues in it, it was really quite amazing. We climbed up a billion stairs to the upper cave, my legs were killing me  from trekking! This cave was slightly bigger but I still preferred the one we saw yesterday!
Took the boat back over to the elephant camp and had a delicious meal of chicken and rice mixed with eggs. So yummy, I ate the whole thing. Also tried the fish as a part of our 'try everything (in moderation)' vow.
After lunch we rode the elephants again but this time without any chair. We sat on it's neck and we got on by climbing up it's back. So crazy! Also, elephants are much more hairy than you would think, and the hairs are pretty itchy. So we each got our own elephant this time and rode into the water! We went down this super steep slope, I seriously though a) the elephant would slip b) I would fall off and c) this completely would not be allowed in the US.
It was amazing!!! We were in the Mekong River riding elephants. They would dip their head all the way under- getting us completely soaked head to toe. Then we they kept spraying us with their trunks. This family of a father and two young boys were with us. The boys were just jumping from back to back of the elephants like it was no big deal. They kept getting mad at my elephant because it wouldn't listen. Katie's was literally throwing her off. So I went on to Katie's and it was impossible to ride! It would put it's head under- so we were a little more than waist deep, then it would start thrashing side to side making it impossible to stay on! I don't know how many times we fell off. It was so unbelievably fun though.
We then (while dripping in our wet and soaking clothes) walked around one of the close by villages. The village specialized in making scarfs and rice wine. A woman gave us some testers of white and red rice wine- very unusual tasting. We said no thank you to the 50% alcohol one. Dean (pronounced like Dee-en), our local tourguide then showed us how they made the rice wine- which I will explain in more detail later!