Elephant Nature Park – Help Save Working Elephants!
I just spent a week with Tida volunteering our time at an elephant rescue and sanctuary called The Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I first heard about the park from another RTW blog.
The first day of volunteering we went to the ENP’s head office in Chiang Mai to sign in and meet the other volunteers. There were tons of people from all walks of life, of all ages and all excited to be there and start working! We got volunteer tshirts that first day, and many of us wore them continuously for the next week. 
We drove 2 hours away to reach the park, a drive that took us through a very scenic valley in which the park is located. The first thing we did upon arriving at the park was feed the elephants their breakfast!! There are large platforms throughout the main hut, both for safely viewing the elephants and park, and for feeding. Large baskets full of fruit were brought out and we got to give handfuls at a time to eagerly waiting (and sniffing) trunks, stretched across the railing. A very fun introduction to the park.
Hungry Ele
In the "elephant kitchen."
We then got together to view a documentary to learn about the park, and why elephant sanctuaries are needed in Thailand. The park (and foundation) were started by a Thai woman named Sangduen “Lek” Chailert. Having been around elephants since she was a little girl, she saw first-hand the horrific abuse and neglect that working elephants were subjected to. She has been campaigning for elephant’s rights and welfare, a sole voice in a country where elephants bring in tourist dollars. Elephants are used for illegal logging, street begging, circus shows and trekking, all which have severely negative mental and physical effects on the elephants. They are kept in line using metal hooks, chains, whips.
All working elephants go through a training ritual called “pajan” which Thai owners put their elephants through, supposedly to domesticate them and make them afraid of people, and therefore obedient. What really happens is no less than torture. The young elephant, aged only 6 years or less, is dragged by at least 20 men using ropes around its legs into a “training crush,” a tiny bamboo cage which just barely fits the elephant. Its legs are restrained, its head is tied so that it can’t move, the trunk is tied, even the tail is restrained. It is a prisoner, unable to defend itself. Then the “training” begins. For 5 days and nights, with no food or water, the elephant is repeatedly stabbed around the ankles, the trunk, the head, the rear, the mouth, the eyes. Their flesh is whipped. The ears are ripped and they are even stabbed in the sensitive inner ear. The elephant, just a toddler, since elephants live as long as we do, screams and trumpets in pain and fear. Blood is everywhere. I remember very clearly a shot of an elephant’s eyes while being tortured in the pajan, and seeing the absolute terror in them, the memory of which still haunts me. After that image I had to look away from the documentary, and my sister Tida says she saw footage of a mahout beating his tiny elephant on the head with a metal hook, and then forcing the baby to pick it up and hand it back to him when it fell to the ground. The village shamans claim this “breaking of the spirit” is necessary to domesticate an elephant. However, Lek wants to educate locals about how they can train their elephants using positive reinforcement, and that the pajan is a barbaric, unnecessary ritual.
Almost all of the elephants at the park have horrible histories of abuse and neglect by their owners and handlers. Some were born at the park and therefore have only experienced loving hands and the freedom to run and forage and scamper like cheeky baby elephants are wont to do.
- Trekking elephants take up, by far, the largest number of working elephants used in tourism. I don’t think the people who sign up for elephant treks are evil. They simply don’t know how cruelly the elephants are treated, and the tourism industry wants to keep it that way. A typical backpacker might think an hour trek couldn’t possibly be bad for an elephant, it’s just a walk isn’t it? But what tourists don’t see are the metal hooks, the beatings, the chains and soulless elephants. What they don’t know is that the elephant they are riding has been put through the pajan.
- Using elephants for street begging is illegal. However, every day, across the city, street begging elephants trek 30 miles to and from Bangkok , where their mahouts (handlers) pay a corrupt police officer 500 baht (US$ 15) to look the other way. They drink filthy water from Bangkok’s polluted canals, routinely get hit by cars, and essentially starve to death since they do not receive anywhere near the amount of food they require daily. I learned at the park – elephants eat A LOT, about 300kg daily.
- Circus elephants are routinely beaten, and savagely, in order to train them to perform unnatural tricks in front of screaming crowds and blaring music. When they are not performing, or being beaten during training, their legs are chained together so tightly they can’t move.
- Logging elephants routinely have broken backs from hauling heavy loads up and down mountain-sides and are worked around the clock without rest.
We had a routine in the park which was something like this:
- 7am: Wake up
- 7:30am: Have yummy breakfast and BIG cup of coffee
- 8am: Start morning chores.
- 9:30am: Start the morning project.
- 10:30am: Start to bring out food baskets to different areas around the park where the elephants are fed
- 11:30am: Morning feeding!
- 12pm: Volunteer feeding!
- 1pm: Elephant bath time
- 2pm: Start the afternoon project.
- 4:30pm: Afternoon ele feeding
- 6:30pm: Dinner
- 8pm: Evening entertainment (or free nights)
- 9pm: Dead asleep in bed
During bathing time!
Cleaning out the shelters.
Our morning chores were either:
- Preparing the elephant’s morning meal and helping out in the “elephant kitchen,” which is tougher work than it sounds. Hauling endless bags of heavy fruit around, cleaning and sorting them is a great workout.
- Going to the plantations to cut corn or bananas for the elephants. Again, pretty fun! Everyone gets handed a machete and goes to work cutting down rows of corn. The hard part is carrying the heavy bundles back to the truck.
- Cleaning out the elephant shelters (read: shovel poop). This was actually quite relaxing, messy as it sounds. Elephant poop is essentially balls of fiber.
There are many projects and errands to be done throughout the day, as the park depends on the work of its volunteers to keep the park running. Volunteers help out doing things like keeping the shelters clean, building new shelters, varnishing buildings, cutting fruit and plants for the eles and so on. Each week there are trips to Elephant Haven, a secluded piece of land the park owns, where 5-7 elephants at a time are taken so they can forage and roam in freedom. We volunteers got to take a group, and spend the night up in Haven, on a simple but cozy platform in the middle of the jungle.
The gang at Haven.
Waiting for Jokia to finish foraging during our hike up to Haven.
We got to know so many awesome new elephants, people and dogs during our week there. Of course among the favorites were the two babies, Faa Mai (6 mos) and Chang Yim (3 mos.) Mae Bua Tong and Dok Ngern, the respective mothers, are very close and the day Chang Yim was born, Mae Bua Tong even broke through the fence to be near Dok Ngern as she gave birth. Today their stable are right next to each other, and as Faa Mai falls asleep for her morning nap, cheeky Chang Yim continues playing next door, usually trying to eat Pom’s hair, (Pom is Lek’s unofficial next-in-command). Faa Mai and Chang Yim are fully owned by the park, and will therefore never have to endure the pajan, and are trained using only positive reinforcement, so they can be handled during feeding, bathing and medical exams.
Cute explosion!! Six-month-old Faa Mai sucks on her trunk like a baby sucking her thumb.
Pom trying to get Chang Yim to sleep. He has other ideas.
The intertwining stories of Mae Perm and Jokia simultaneously break my heart and mend it back together. Mae Perm is Lek’s first rescue, thought to be originally from Burma and used in Thailand for illegal logging. She is 89 years old and one of the gentlest souls in the whole world. Jokia was also rescued from a brutal life as a logging elephant, one that ultimately led to her being blinded by her handlers. Jokia, heavily pregnant, was still forced to work around the clock, with no rest and insufficient food. When she was tired and slow to work, her handlers shot rocks at her eyes with slingshots. She lost her sight in that eye. Her baby was born while she carrying a log up a steep hillside. The baby, still in it’s umbilical sac, rolled down the hillside but Jokia’s handlers refused to let her rescue it, despite her cries. The baby died, and Jokia plunged into depression, so emotional are elephants. When she refused to work, her handler shot her other eye with an arrow, and with that cruel act, she was blinded forever. Jokia came to the park, where Mae Perm immediately took her under her wing. They are now inseparable. Mae Perma and Jokia communicate using low grumbles, as elephants commonly do. When Jokia trumpets because she no longer knows where Mae Perm is, Mae Perm will come literally running to her side, trumpeting all the while. They greet each other by lovingly running their trunks all over the other’s face and and trunk, reassuring the other and making what can only be described as happy squeaks. How good does your heart feel right now?
Jokia (L) and Mae Perm (R) on their way to Elephant Haven
Hope, Jokia and Mae Perm come to greet us
Medo and Mae Mai are another bonded pair at the park, with Mae Mai serving as Medo’s unofficial bodyguard. Medo, tiny compared to the other elephants, broke her ankle and then her back working as a logging elephant. The horrific nature of her injuries are obvious when you see her. Her back is severely crippled. But she was rescued and came to the park, where she can now roam freely, if slowly, and safely. When walking through the park one day, I saw Mae Mai watching Medo from a distance. She, without prompting from Medo, moved herself slowly between Medo and the path some of the park dogs which were walking down. Medo is afraid of dogs. Mae Mai slapped her trunk against the ground towards the dogs, an aggressive gesture that means, “stay away.” The dogs, living at an elephant sanctuary, know this, and immediately steered away.
Tiny Medo has a broken back and ankle which was never treated before she came to the park. She is bonded to Mae Mai.
Speaking of dogs, I was officially and securely in dog heaven while at the elephant sanctuary. Dogs find their way to the park in the most peculiar ways. Some dogs are rescued to come stay here, some simply find their way and never leave, and some are village dogs that come floating down the river, stay a few days and then make their way back home. The dogs have made natural packs, one of which stayed near our huts. This meant we had a guest in our room every night, sleeping peacefully and sometimes snoring from underneath our bed.
Number One (yes, that is his name) makes himself comfortable in our room.
Phet, which means diamond in Thai, who would always greet me like this on my way back to the huts. Stick in mouth, wagging tail, curled down ears. What a heartbreaker!
It was a lot of hard work, but soooo satisfying to feel tired at the end of the day, watching big, beautiful, safe elephants in the distance as the sun sets. I can’t recommend this experience enough. For anyone that loves animals, loves Thailand and wants to do some good in the world, please consider volunteering at the park! The foundation is developing a new sanctuary located in Surin, and they need your help more than ever. The foundation would like to show the government and people in tourism that a sanctuary is possible! And even if you can’t volunteer, please help spread the word about elephant welfare in Thailand and beyond!
Me and Tida with Lek, the Elephant Nature Park's founder, and an amazing woman!!
Back from Elephant Heaven
Well, Tida and I just finished our week volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, and I can’t fully express what an amazing experience it was. I have so many thoughts and emotions tumbling around my head about it. I’ve started writing a blog post in greater detail, but it will take me a while to fully flesh it out.
Until then, let me whet your appetite with this:
Me feeding one of my favorite eles, Rara. Rara is also the park's newest rescue, saved from the Sheraton in Krabi, where she worked in the lobby greeting guests.
Me and Tida snuggling up with Faa Mai during her nap. Faa Mai is only 9 months old and adorable!!
Thailand in Pictures
Though we’ve been in the country for several weeks, the first three of them were basically spent with family. For me, this meant eating, bobbing my head a lot and smiling for my Thai-speaking relatives, and trying to get a handle on G’s family tree. She has no fewer than 10 uncles and aunts and who knows how many cousins.
Oh – this is funny. Our computer, long our trusty companion, gave out a couple of weeks ago. Probably not its own fault – since it was he chosen site for an ANTS NEST! You heard it. Our keyboard became home to an ant colony. I’m not sure if they were attracted to the heat or the food…but they certainly were attracted. And they certainly made the keyboard useless…you may have noticed not a lot of posts lately.
Anyway – I’m in an internet cafe now and have posted a bunch of stuff to Flickr – here’s the highlights:
View from G's mom's house in Phra Pradeng - note the encroaching jungle and the flooding, which happens on a tidal basis every day during the monsoon.
View of G's dad's family's house
How cheesy is this? F&G party symmetrically at the King's Summer Palace near Ayuttya
G, her sister Tida, and Pa Soy at the night market in Ayuttya
F with G's dad, Nat, at a fish restaurant on the water in Bangkok
One of our cousins prepares for his monk ceremony. This event brought the whole family to temple...all two hundred of them or so! I was encouraged to "lum" or dance Thai style. I washed out in embarrasement...
"Dong..."
Nat got a little scratch on his toe which became realy infected...here you see it pre-Cipro...
Requisite pic of Gulaya and dogs at the artesanal market near Ayuttya
HI!
G's grandma can't really get around too much, so she spends her time on the cool tile downstairs. It is amazing how hot it gets in Ayuttya...and this was the cool season! All we could do was lay around and be still with her all afternoon...
G's uncle raises fighting cocks...
The blody carcass of one of our many tormentors...here seen in soup.
Tida, G's mom, Pai, her Grandma Ya, and G.
G's uncle brings a HUGE bunch of betel nuts to Ya. She spends all day eating them, an involved ritual which has her cutting nuts, scooping them out, spreading paste on a leaf, making a package, and then chewing on the whole wad while preparing the next one. YUM!
This is super interesting. There is a huge hive of bees in G's uncle's room. He doesn't kill them, though, saying that since they don't hurt anyone often, he really sees no call to do so. Can you imagine this in the States? Live and let live? I don't think so!!
Strange as it may seem...this is not an uncommon pose for G. She can't pass an animal without taking a picture. Maybe you noticed.
Dubai in Pictures – belated
Catching up on pictures from Dubai…
We were SO excited to get on a plane. We had a bathroom, drank a Singapore Sling, and watched MOVIES!
You have to wear sweaters in the desert...just like in the jungles of Singapore.
We were gobsmacked at what a beautiful job decorating Sherif and Nisreen had done with their place. We enjoyed hanging out and watching cable, reading magazines, and surfing the web...
My friend Magda from high school in Egypt hosted a reunion...
Yes, it's true, there's a ski slope at one of the malls...
Sherif showed us such a great time...here we were at an indoor amusement park...how do we say VIDEO GAMES?!
Required picture of G in front of the Burj el Dubai...tallest building in the world for now.
Oh there you are…
So I’m studying Thai. It has taken nine years of being with G to do this, but I’m finally at it. Actually, I’m doing it full time while G and her sister are off in Chiang Mai at an elephant park.
Me, on the other hand, I’m in Krabi, in the south of Thailand. Staing at a $7 dollar a night hotel, and studying 7 hours a day. I have to say, it’s been far too long since I’ve been a student – I find it MUCH easier to study these days than I used to – possibly because I’m doing it for the pure enjoyment of it. And yes, it turns out that Thai is pretty hard to learn.
Packing: You need much less than you think.
Have I mentioned that I have been traveling for the last 3 months with only flip-flops for shoes? I asked my friend Grace to take my hiking shoes back to LA with her, after meeting up in Paris in July. I figured I would buy a pair of less dorky shoes, maybe another pair of trusty Chucks. I still haven’t gotten around to it, so I’ve been rocking city, mountain and beach in flip flops. It’s been pretty easy actually, aside from the time we were scrambling up and down rocky hillsides in Turkey. I could have used some better footwear then.
I was inspired to finally make a gear list for all you readers curious about what we’ve packed for a year around the world… behold!
Fortune Favors Fools
Sorry for the long absence friends, but as I’ve said before, the more fun I’m having, the less I tend to blog. Good for me, bad for youse.
The Fern and I are now in Dubai, visiting F’s old friend from high school, Sherif, who picked us up from the airport and is graciously housing us during our visit. Unfortunately Sherif’s very pregnant wifey, Nisreen, isn’t here now but hopefully we’ll catch up with the three of them again soon! Their apartment is GORGEOUS. I want everything in it, or at least I want them to come decorate our house, whenever we get one. It’s going to be very easy spending a few days here while Sherif is at work, watching cable TV, laying by the pool and using limitless interweb. Oh yeah, and I suppose we might go see the city or something. This post will unfortunately be photo-less, as the UAE blocks flickr (really… flickr?).
So where did our adventures leave you last? Well we finished the Gullet cruise (which I can’t recommend enough), and spent a day just chilling in Fethiye, a sleepy sea-side town on the Med. We seem to be going to a lot of sleepy sea-side towns. Who wouldn’t like sleepy sea-side towns? After that we headed to Pammukale, which means “cotton castle” in Turkish, home to the ancient city of Hierapolis. Hierapolis was built on top of a gigantic white “castle” of travertine (a stone material currently used in hip kitchens and patios), which formed giant pools and trippy walls that look like bubble-wrap. The site was much bigger than I’d originally thought, and we spent a good part of the day walking around, watching tortoises have sex amongst ancient ruins, watching enormous Japanese tourists groups with their often puzzling ensembles (are those arm warmers?), watching tanga-clad Russian tourists striking ridiculous poses in photos, and generally being amazed that we were being allowed to clamber all over structures that were built in the 2nd century BC. Holy crap that’s old! I thought we were still swinging from the trees back then, fighting the dinosaurs! I was never really any good at anthropology.
After Pammukale, we went to another ancient ruin, Ephesus. It sounds petulant, but we started to feel like once you’ve seen one 2000 year old city, you’ve pretty much seen them all. I mean, sometimes there’s not much left. For example the Temple of Artemis, Wonder of the Ancient World, is no longer the colossal beast it must have been a bazillions years ago, but a single stone column surrounded by souvenir stands and chickens. We had a curious tour guide that day, who always referred to us as “dear guests” and constantly whipped his Turkish worry beads in small circles about his fingers.
We took an overnight bus to Istanbul that night, arrived early in the morning and went back to the hostel we stayed at previously, the Agora Guesthouse. They let us have a shower (bliss!) and store our bags, and even refunded us the money from a tour we had canceled. Score! F has already written about our little adventure getting into Greece, which can be summed up in this nifty little saying: fortune favors fools. I like to think of that as the theme for our trip.
The four of us, F, Nicole and Jack, and I hung out on Thessaloniki’s Perea Beach for a day, then decided to rent a car with the intent to drive to Athens. That was, until we discovered how far Athens actually was and that the tollway costs 25 euros. Scrap that idea, what’s closer than Athens? What’s this island, Corfu? Let’s go there!! We crammed like circus clowns into the world’s smallest rental car and zipped off in a Westerly direction. The rental car guy laughed in our face when we told him we didn’t have a GPS and said dryly, “good luck.”
That night we stopped in Ioannina and had yummy gyros and Greek salad for a steal. 15 bucks for the 4 of us! We had an “early” start that morning, at 11, and caught the ferry over to Corfu, which took just over an hour. Not knowing where to go, we stopped at a few beaches before finally breaking down and getting online to check our beloved HostelWorld for hostel recommendations. We found a great hostel called Sunrock, which is on a short cliff above a small, pristine beach with amazing sunset views. Breakfast AND dinner is included in the price?! We’ll stay 3 days. We had an awesome time on Corfu, and celebrated Ferna’s 35th birthday there as well! One of our new friends at Sunrock asked F how old he was turning, and after F replied, this 22-year-old backpacker replied, “holy shit. That old.“ I did get stung by a wasp on his birthday, which, 6 days later is still swollen. Nicole and Jack routinely kicked our asses in Scrabble but F got a bingo (where you use all 7 tiles on your rack) with the word PIEHOLE. Turns out “piehole does not appear in Merriam-Webster’s Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, 3rd Edition” according to Scrabble.com but I think maybe the 4th edition should consider adding it and stop being so elitist.
We had an uneventful drive back to Thessaloniki, since we used the tollway this time which cut our driving time down to 6 hours from 8. Since we didn’t learn our lesson from last time, we again showed up to a bus station, hoping to buy a ticket on the overnight bus back to Istanbul, which left that night. It doesn’t take a genius to guess the bus was sold out and we ended up having to travel the next day, my 30th birthday. I was sort of bummed about having to take a 12 hour bus on my birthday, but oh well, unfortunately I don’t control the Turkish bus schedules.
All in all, it’s been a very fun and busy 2 weeks. If we are remiss again on our blogging duties, check out Nicole and Jack’s new blog about living in Prague: Czechin In!
Happy Birthday Ferna!!
Happy birthday to the best friend and hubby ever!!!
From Boy to Man
My fave Ferna pictures over the last 8 months:
The Kindness of Strangers
The perfect plan. Timed to the hour, schedule laid out to see the major sites in Turkey while still making it to Thessaloniki, Greece, in time to meet up with Nicole and Jack. First an overnight bus from Fethiye to Pammukale, tour Pammukale, then another bus to Ephesus, and then another overnight bus to Istanbul. And then an overnight train to Thessaloniki. Trust to Fate that we would be able to get train tickets for a same day departure.
Fate, it turns out, is not be relied on lightly. The train to Thessaloniki is under construction for the next month, and, didn’t you notice, today is the last day of the holy month of Ramadan. All buses to Thessaloniki from Istanbul are booked.
Close up of our heroes’ shocked faces. But…we have to be in Thessaloniki tomorrow. We have to! Cut scene to the Istanbul Otogar, or main bus station. Panoramic view of a building sized comparably to LAX, but without the organization, ease of use, or intuitiveness. And no one speaks English. And everyone is trying to sell you a ticket you can buy five feet away directly from one of the 100 or so different bus companies.
Apparently (for our Turkish is not very good) you can take a local bus to Ipsala, on the border with Greece, walk across, and get a bus to “Salonik” (is that the same place we’re going to?). As Fate would have it – should we be worried – there is a bus to Ipsala in one hour. Fantastic! Things are looking up.
Gibberish, hand motions, rain. You mean you want us to get off the bus HERE? But what about Ipsala? Ok, Ok! That way? Greece…GREECE, right? Yes, it’s funny that it’s raining. Ha ha. But wait – there’s a taxi waiting, right here in the middle of the highway where you are stranding us…in the rain…perfect!
Ipsala is nowhere near the border. Luckily the taxi driver knows where the border is, and drops us off without a hitch. The border is also known to about 3.7 billion mosquitoes, all of whom have risen in the past week because of early rains. Quick switch from shorts to long pants.
Between the Turkish border and Greece lies a stretch of about 2 miles which cannot be crossed on foot. Hitchhiking is necessary. Half an hour passes, in the rain, mosquitoes swarming and sucking. Hitchhiking? It’s DARK. This is the last time we are relying on the kindness of strangers.
Never, ever, ever say that. Yes, could we cross the border with you? Oh, you’ll move all the groceries you are bringing home to your wife for Ramadan? Thank you so much! Us? Oh, we think we’re just going to go across the border and sleep – it’s much later than we thought. Really? Nowhere to sleep? At all?
YOU WILL TAKE US ALL THE WAY TO THESSALONIKI?
Never, ever, ever say you won’t rely on the kindness of strangers. Fate can’t be relied on – but we’ve come across more kindness than we ever expected. We are safe now, and warm, and have a new friend.
Olympos to Fethiye Gullet Cruise
It’s funny, but I put something up before we got on the boat about how the storm that hit Istanbul hadn’t affected us, and for folks not to worry. Well – certainly there was no cause to worry, but that damn storm sure did end up affecting us! Thank god for the Transderm Scop Patch, which G used instead of regular old Dramamine. Cue product placement. She gets horribly motion sick, and yet she never wavered despite really high swell and stormy weather while we were sailing. For those of you who don’t know what a gullet is, it’s a traditional Turkish sailboat which these days serves no purpose other than ferrying tourists around the southern islands. It’s an all wood affair which leaks and creaks during the best of times – and definitely doesn’t handle rough seas that well!
The calm before the storm
Held up by the wind...
Weather notwithstanding, we had a fantastic time with our shipmates – with yet another round of Facebook entries to make! Mary and Katie from San Francisco introduced the whole group to Bananagrams, a Scrabble-like wordgame that took up several evenings. Of course, we had a rule where you had to have a bad word in every turn, so that got pretty funny. [G: a word of advice, multi-cultural partners have the advantage of way more words.] And, luckily, we did get enough sun to go swimming several times in the warm waters of the Med. Everyone loved jumping off different parts of the boat and making lewd jokes about the “noodle” flotation toys they had on board. I’m still amazed by how many ruins you can see just cruising the coast – including some which sit underwater and are visible from aboard the ship – beautiful!
I should also mention that the food on the gullet was amazing – shout out to ZuZu, our cook. He rustled up three meals a day to feed 16 people in a tiny galley and with seemingly no supplies. Stuffed peppers, yoghurt salads, fried whole fish, chicken wings, eggplant casserole and more. Delicious! And, as on our last cruise, we LOVED not having to worry about how much we were spending on food! A less savory aspect of crew behavior was that our toupee-clad captain kept making amorous advances – which was funny for the rest of us, but I think less so for the objects of his desire.
One of the coolest things that happened on the cruise actually happened before we boarded. Harika, a lovely woman from Izmir who was traveling with her fiance, Alisan, read G and my fortunes in our turkish coffee grounds. We loved it!! Apparently G has a lottery fish (or at least, some piece of good fortune coming along which we choose to believe is winning the lottery) while I have a unicorn outside my door – which I am not looking at. Gotta turn around, F!
Oh – this was exciting – while we were trying to find shelter in a bay during the storm we came across a HUGE megayacht that looked like something in a 007 movie. We looked it up afterwards and it turns out that it belongs to some Russian tycoon. The damned thing looked like a warship in the rain, and it had these lights underneath the waterline that lit up the ocean around it. Apparently it was designed by Phillipe Starck. Check it out.
A bunch of people swam over to the superyacht to see if they'd get invited to tea...notice the noodles waving...
Some more pics below…
