Lyndal arrived in Phuket and for the frist day we did pretty much what we'd done before (except the part about getting tattoos, which we did only once). We lay on the beach, had massages, ate lots of food and so on.
Then we had a sort of crazy day on 15th December. We started off by hiring elephants to do a jungle walk, which was good fun, despite it being the third elephant ride I'd had in three weeks. The photo shows me inelegantly seated on my elephant, Mario. Moments after this photo was taken, Mario inexplicably went berserk. He flung his trunk in the air and trumpeted wildly. He then started running at breakneck speed downhill! He was trumpeting, shrieking and crashing downhill in a terrifying way, and all the time the mahoot was yelling at him to stop (I assume) and thumping in on the head. I clung on for dear life, only being held in place by a tiny piece of rope and my hands grimly grasping the bar of the seat. Happily, I lived, as you would expect from the fact that I am writing this blog, but I received a very nasty bruise on the back of my left calf, to rival the one received during white-water rafting in Nepal.
Our next not-relaxing activity was parasailing, which involved being hoisted up in the air by a rope attached to a boat, and then being dragged around the bay while gliding at sickening heights above the surface of the water. The photo shows me up in the air about to come in for a spectacular landing, which was sadly not captured on camera as my daughters were too busy being chatted up by handsome some young Englishmen on the beach, quite a common occurence for them. :-)
Having defied death twice in one day we then went bungy-jumping. The photo shows me being prepared for the jump. The smile on my face hides sheer, naked terror. I was determined to go first so that I could get it over with and not dwell on the thought of how stupid it was to throw oneself off a 60m-high tower with just a few rubber bands around one's ankles. The crane took me to the top and I looked down at the pond 60m below me. All my instincts told me that I couldn't possibly jump off that tower, even though the logical part of me said that hundreds of people had jumped and survived. So I just did what I do when faced with really unpleasant tasks: concentrated on following orders. I asked the jumpmaster, a very friendly Canadian chap, to count to three, and I just focussed on listening to his voice. When he got to 'three' I immediately jumped. I must say that I then immediately regreted my obediance as I plunged towards the pond at 9.86 metres per second per second. I screamed like a little girl - it was the scariest few seconds of my life. No amount of rational thinking could overcome the sheer visceral terror of plunging face-forward towards the ground.
When I watched the video afterwards, I was very pleased that I had been unable to hear the helpful commentary from my daughters on the ground, like 'don't do it!' and 'she's gonna hit that pole!'. Thanks Lyndal and Michaela. :-)
The girls also jumped, although the soon-to-be Army Officer Lyndal actually had to be pushed off the platform by the jumpmaster. Perhaps there isn't a career in parachute corps for Lyndal. :-)
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