The Elephant and the Lagoon

Friday 11th December 2009, 7pm, the beach - Koh Mak.

There's one very important thing that I've not mentioned yet because I've not found the time to write about it and also because I barely have the words to tell you how utterly and inexplicably perfect an experience it was. I cannot make it sound better than it was with fancy vocabulary so I'll just say it plainly... on Wednesday morning I spent an hour sat on the back of an elephant while he waked through the Jurassic Park inner-island jungle of Koh Chang. At the end of that hour I stripped to my bikini, climbed back on my elephant, and the two of us went swimming in a lagoon.

He loved the water, and while I gripped on tightly round his neck he kept diving deeply under the water, paddling away a metre below the surface with me his passenger awe-stuck and delighted clambering over his back. He was so gentle, this giant 3 tonnes beast, that when after a too forceful dive I slipped off, he came to the surface and placed his tusk under my foot so that I could use it a step to climb back up. I thought chasing the sunset on a motorbike was good, but swimming underwater on the back of an elephant was, and always will be, one of the most amazing things I have ever done in my life.

Now, and even an hour after it was over, I can't believe it happened. Thankfully my friend took photos so that one day my disbelief at this encounter will be disproved by photographic evidence. But we obviously couldn't get photos of his powerful, majestic form gliding through the still blue lagoon underwater, like a disfigured manatee or an ungainly, over-sized mermaid. These memories aren't on camera, they're just mine, they belong only to me - and this is what I meant before about my material possessions being only 'things'. I've left the stuff at home, and each day become richer in everything else I own.