Ele-phantastic Day!
7-20-2018
Today could be considered the best day ever, aside from our wedding of course…right? We got to spend the day hanging out with elephants! When we first starting looking into our trip we knew we would want to see these amazing animals up close. However, once we began to research, we quickly saw that the elephant tourism industry here is really sad. There are tons of camps offering riding or playing with elephants, but elephants are just not meant for that, which means they are often taken as babies from their mothers and “broken” in order to be used for tourism.
Where we started feeding them bananas.
We also slowly became aware of how much Thailand doesn’t actually care about elephants. Despite seeing statues of elephants and elephant gods, the government and a lot of the people don’t see elephants as anything but property. The government only recently enacted a law against parading elephants around the streets because people were getting hurt from car accidents stopping to look at it.
Kept having to remind Anna that she can't just hug the baby.
After reading many articles about this, we were glad to find Elephant Nature Park, a rescue and rehabilitation center for elephants previously in other areas of the tourism industry. In addition to having the nature center which is now home to about 80 elephants, they also offer trips to smaller camps which is what we decided to do. These camps are at local farms where previous mahouts, the elephant trainers, have decided to change their ways from previously using them for entertainment to now being raised freely. This is a way for them to continue to make a living in a more ethical way. Unfortunately once they have been taken from the wild and trained for entertainment, they can’t be returned to the wild and survive.
There were 4 elephants at this location, as they tend to live in small herds. There was a mom and her baby and two other young elephants here. The mom had a noticeable limp and our guide told us that she was previously in the circus and then used for riding and has a dislocated hip from being chained up.
We first fed them bananas and it was amazing to see them use their trunks so easily to take the food and feed themselves. The baby would only eat bananas we had peeled and the mom was very picky about which bananas she wanted. If she didn’t like the one given, she would toss it on the floor and reach out for another. We got to walk alongside the elephants through the jungle, stopping to watch them take breaks to drink water, eat more bananas and grasses, and scratch themselves on trees. They would also sometimes stop to just play with each other. At one point the baby got tired and laid down for a nap and we watched the mom cover her up with leaves first and then rested one foot on her while she napped.
Just making sure the baby has nice nap.
Our guide told us how when the nature park first began in the 1990’s the owner, Lek, was viewed as an issue to many people. Elephants had been used for tourism for Thailand for a long time and people had begun to depend on them for their incomes. However, she was so passionate about it and began the camp, paying people to take their elephants and care for them. There were people who even tried to pay to have her killed so she wouldn’t change their way of life. Apparently some of her family even disowned her, but she said that the elephants were now her family. Our guides favorite story about Lek was that she once saw an elephant that had it’s tusks taken and it’s face became infected. The elephants owner wouldn’t give it up so she actually stole it and then offered to pay them to rent it until it healed. She paid them $900 a month to keep and care for this elephant because she wanted to help it so much.
Just walking with them down the stream.
After lunch, we got to give them a mud bath and then play with them in the water to clean them off. It was so much fun to watch them play with each other, flopping in the mud, climbing on top of each other, and splashing us with water. We ended the day feeding them rice and squash balls, that we made for them, as well as more bananas. We then said goodbye to them. It was an amazing day, and to be able to spend it so close to them.
After a long day, we decided to head to another night market. Unsure of how the food would be, we decided to grab dinner before and then snack there. When we got to the market, the food all looked so incredible that we decided to have a second dinner. We visited the “cowboy hat lady” who has been featured on Anthony Bourdain’s shows and several others and got pork leg and rice. We also had the best Pad Thai we have ever had. Overall, it was a great end to memorable day.
