Elephant baths and the End of an Era

Our last day in Sauraha, Betty and I woke up bright and early and went for breakfast. We intended to have a ridiculously productive day and head off biking around the area but wanted to stop first to watch the elephants bathe at the riverside. We walked down and sat in the sunshine (a short lived pastime in Chitwan since it rains like every morning, afternoon and evening - sound a little like Vancouver??.) waiting for the elephants to show up. Turns out, you can pay 200 rupees ($2.50) to sit on the elephant's neck for about five minutes while it stands/sits in the river and bathes itself - essentially using its trunk to squirt the both of you, with river water (yum, mouth closed). Super touristy but so cool! (to ride an elephant in the nearby community forest for one hour costs 1300 rupees - and you're sitting in a box , lame) Elephants are so much more interesting up close! They have really rough wrinkly skin and spikey coarse hair on their head. And they're really smart gentle creatures. Ok, I want an elephant. So for five minutes we were bathed by elephants in the morning sun (pretty awesome) and then Betty and I walked back to our cottage to shower again to get the dirt and river water out of our hair. After lunch we hired bikes and pedaled around some nearby Tharou villages (the local people who used to live in the National Park but were relocated outside once it became a park). It was so pretty! Bumpy dirt roads surrounded by rice paddies and mud huts and colorful laundry drying on clothes lines. Or our last activity of the day we checked out the elephant breeding centre (mentioned, I might add, as a "must see" in the Lonely Planet) - for a total of two minutes. It was horrible. The adult elephants are all chained up, feet together and then chained to a pole while the babies roam around. The adults aren't able to get to their babies and the trainers hit them with sticks if they try to move and they cry out. Sickening. So mad we supported this and that it's a tourist attraction and so happy that I went to the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand and learned that training elephants doesn't need to be like this. Bit if a sad end to the day. Right on time (4pm) the clouds rolled in and the thunder, lightening and downpour started so we biked home in the rain to relax before dinner. At dinner time the storm as still going strong so we suited up in our rain gear to walk to "town" 5 minutes away. It was a bit scary walking to the restaurant, the thunder was so loud it felt like the lightening would hit us. We found a restaurant (most places you sit outside on the patio) but it was raining sideways so we were ushered inside while the owner boarded up the doorway and we spent an hour inside writing in our journals by candle light (gotta love the Nepal power outages) while we waited for dinner - dal bhat of course, yum :)