Tues 4th March, ELEPHANTS!!!

Today has been one of my best days so far of my trip, it was that good!!!I got up about 7.30, ate a quick brekkie and hopped in the back of a wagon down to the river, where I was going to be going crocodile hunting. Now crocodile hunting is one of those things I thought was completly pointless and we wern't going to see one, but hey guess what 5 minutes into our hunt we spotted a long nosed crocodile, these ones are just harmless they just eat fish. The crocodile I really wanted to see was a marsh mugger, these ones are a bit vicious and eat anything including humans!! We carried on down the river for another 30min, eventually we stopped and pulled upto a river bank in our boat. From here we walked through some open grassland to an elephant breeding centre. On the way to the centre there was a chance we could see a rhino but all we saw was a huge pile of its shit and a few footprints. The elephant centre was ace, although it was a bit sad that some of the elephants were chained up, however the centre was completly outdoors and very like the wild for them. The baby elephants were allowed to roam free, there was one which was less than a week old it was CUTE!! I then bought a bag of cookies to fed the baby elephants (don't worry I'm not that stupid they were special elephant cookies) The elephants were well smart as soon as they saw the bag of cookies they were straight over, if you put them in your pocket they would put their trunk in your pocket to get them out. The bigger ones were a bit more cheeky and would gang up on you s they got more cookies! Anyways we finished the feeding and moved on to see a Thuro village. The Thuro's were the original indigenous people in the Chitwan area. Chitwan means heart of the jungle. After we finished looking round we went back to river for the elephant bathing. There were 4 elephants in the river playing and spraying water. The guide was like would anyone like a go, the rest of my group were all boring and said no, but typically me, I was like hell yes. One of the elephants then came over to the river bank and sat down, I then climbed on its back and it stood up (just to note they had their keepers with them, they wern't totally wild). The elephant then waded into the middle of the river and started spraying me with it trunk and generally messing around, however nothing prepared me for what it did next. It clearly decided I wasn't wet enough and ROLLED OVER, sending me into the river with a big splash. Now at this point I totally shit myself I thought it was gonna roll over again and squash me! I've never moved so quick, I was out of that river quicker than you could say elephant. Anyways after a bit more splashing we headed back to the lodge to get dry and have some food. In the afternoon we went on an elephant safari, this was ace, we climbed onto the elephant and disappeared into the jungle for 3hours, where I got to see two rhinos!!!!! They usually really shy and quite dangerous so we were quite lucky to see them. So anyways that was my fantastic day!!!!