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During our day tour to Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, we had two stopovers: one to a coconut producer’s workshop on the way to the floating market; one to an elephant farm on the way back to Bangkok.

That workshop was very small with a fair sized orchard farm adjacent to it. Not surprisingly, the souvenir market comes with this stopover was much bigger than both the coconut workshop and orchard farm:).

The stopover in the afternoon was  much more exciting. We had the chance to ride an elephant inside the farm and across the river. There were also buckets of lady finger bananas were available for elephant feeding for 100 bart each. We grabbed a bucket and waited eagerly in the queue for our turn to ride. While waiting in the queue, a lady in front of started to eat those bananas in her bucket. Curious about the taste of those bananas, we tried one from our bucket too… It was sweet and delicious!

Having heard quite a few horror stories such as elephants were treated badly or elephant keeper killed by his elephant, I was a little wary of it but our elephant ride turned out to be super pleasant. The elephant ride was super pleasant. Those elephants we so calm and well looked after from what I saw. Our elephant keeper kept talking to his elephant and obviously there was a strong bond between them. Not sure if there’s a term of “elephant whisper”, but if there’s such expression, our elephant keeper certainly is one.

The elephant was stopped for us to have many photo opportunities on the way. Towards the end of our ride, the elephant keeper pulled out a box suddenly and presented us a box of jewellery which appeared to be mad of elephant tusks. Kind of turn off by it, I didn’t show any interest. “Ok, tip, tip.” The elephant keeper then asked. That’s fair enough, he did a good job and deserved his tip. Would have given him without being asked:).

Oh, remember those bananas we bought for elephant feeding? We gave the bucket to our elephant keeper, then he passed the whole bucket of bananas to the elephant; they were taken in one go and finished off within 30 seconds, skin included. Cute hey? Why did I imagine elephants would eat those bananas one by one like humans do!