Elephant Dusting

[I have been] up-close and intimate with Thai elephants before, on several occasions, including a three day course to become a mahout, a certified elephant trainer that looks super on my resume. These super-sized gray barns are playful infants and budding artists on the inside, anxious to pick the odd banana from a pocket and heft a paintbrush to pen a picture of their mahout riding topside. My fellow students declared it the happiest three days of their obviously sheltered lives though we admittedly looked goofy in bright blue overalls, drenched when our elephants played submarine, dusty when brooming them off in the morning and slightly aghast when washing and straining elephant dung to make fibrous designer papers. It all culminated in a graduation ceremony for newly minted mahouts, some who may have thought their elephant was actually paying attention to commands in Thai, made unintelligible to any reasonable elephant by heavy accents of English, German and Japanese. more...

Courtesy of Dave Rich and Mary Alexon

Swimming Cobra

Harboring a fascination with dangerous reptiles I trek yearly to the snake farm run by the Thai Red Cross, maintained to harvest venom for antidotes because Thais are snack food for cobras that infest the jungle, more per capita than sheep to Kiwis in New Zealand. For less than three bucks tourists are admitted to an almost terminally exciting reptile show at the corner of Henri Dunant Road and Rama IV Road, a few blocks from the subway and the sky train in the center of old Bangkok. Herpetologists put an amazing array of snakes through their paces, plucking swimming cobras from the farms' canals, uncoiling ten foot (three meter) long king cobras, milking mambas for venom and generally scaring the up-close audience half to death, which I always love a lot. Afterwards those with the gumption are invited to model a massive boa constrictor that looks like a giant yellow diamondback, darting tongue seeking the closest ear. Go and revel like me because it's cheaper and more exciting than an ear candle. more...

MemoryBook by MyTripJournal enters Beta

We were flooded with requests to participate in the Beta testing of our MemoryBook Wizard. 26 travelers helped us to identify potential issues with the editing and preview screens for the Front Cover, Intro Page, Table of Contents, Maps, Entry and Guestbook pages, with a completion ratio of 76.9%.

We will now proceed to fix any outstanding issues and study our Beta testers' comments and suggestions for next versions of the Wizard. In Part 2 of 2 of the testing, we will focus on the pricing function and Checkout pages of the Wizard.

We will keep you updated as MemoryBook continues to develop. We would also like to extend a huge thank you to our Beta testers and the hundreds of other travelers who offered to test. We were frankly overwhelmed by your generosity of spirit!

Christmas Special - last chance

In celebration of the holidays, we have a Christmas special, where we are offering 20% off any premium subscription. This special can be used either as a gift certificate (promo code: CRHWXA) or to renew or extend your own subscription (promo code: 863FVA). Act fast, as this offer expires on December 25th. Cheers and happy holidays from the MyTripJournal team.