Lakshmi

On the way back from Kandy is a place everyone calls the elephant orphanage. More on that in the next post, but it's a pretty cool place in terms of saving poor, orphaned elephants who have no home, no job and no stimulus package to help them out. (I know, it sounds like the beginnings of a great Dickens novel.) Anyway, like any good tourist attraction, just down the road from that is a small, private operation better known as a tourist trap, where you can hand over some cash and they take you out back to their own little elephant herd. This is where we first met Lakshmi.


Now if you remember your 5th grade biology class, you'll know that Asian elephants are the smaller ones. So if your elephant is named something like Lakshmi and not something like Indougou, it would be one of the smaller variety. That being said, their tusks are pretty big.


And their teeth are even more amazing. We were told by our very informative guide that an elephant has only four of them. Two on top and two on bottom. But when each tooth is this big, do you really more than that? If only we'd gotten a good picture of the toothbrush...


And that's right, Lakshmi took us for a ride through the jungle. Did I mention how big she was??


If you look close you can see the equal parts terror and giddiness on Sina's face, the sheer joy on Ruby's face, and the enormous determination on mine as I held onto the chain, and all the rest of the family holds on to me.

Here we are headed off to the rice paddy to do some work for the day.


And the big finale - Lakshmi was a bit of a show-off with the curly trunk and all. It was really, really fun, and Ruby's still talking about Lakshmi a week later.