Elephant Nature Park

Early start today to go to the elephant nature park, which is about 1 1/2 hours chiangmai. In chiangmai there are so many elephant parks, most of them do things like mahoot training, where you can learn to be an elephant carer, or camps where you can go and see elephants do things like play football or paint a picture. We decided we didn't want to go somewhere like this as it's pretty cruel so we opted for elephant nature park, which is a charity that was set up in 1995 by a thai lady called Lek. She's from a small hilltribe and has dedicated her life to rescuing abused elephants and setting up this camp. She started with 4 elephants and there's now 33, including 2 babies that were born at the camp. It's such a nice place, and relies heavily on donations from visitors or people around the world. Elephants used to be useful in Thailand as they were used to things like logging, but since that has been made illegal they are no longer deemed useful and therefore are treated really poorly. A lot of them get bought by people that ride them around chiangmai and bangkok in the evening and get tourists to pay them money so they can feed the elephant. They dose them up with amphetamines so they stay awake longer and can earn more money. This is currently NOT illegal in Thailand, and since we've been here we've already seen 2 elephants at night walking round town who looked really distressed. If you want to you can sign a petition to appeal to the government to stop this, lots of locals support the action, it's just the thai government don't deem it important enough:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/street-begging-elephants/

So anyway, we arrived at the park and began to meet the elephants. It's a really open place and they're free to go whereever they want (within the land that the park owns, although they seem to love going outside). Each elephant has a mahout, which is their carer/previous trainer etc. It just makes sure they're not getting up to mischief, as a lot of the young ones are prone to do. So they roam around and you kind of join them. Some of them you have to avoid, like the mothers of the babies because they can get quite territorial, but others you can go up to and pet, takes photos with. There are 2 times in the day where you can feed them, they eat 2 tonnes of fruit and vegetables each so it does take a while to feed them! They usually take the food out of your hands, but some of them (the older ones) like it if you put the food directly into their mouths. We got some really good photos of this so they will follow. You also get a chance to wash the elephants, which involves them stomping into a lake and you following and chucking buckets of water all over them until they are satisfied. You get very wet but it's also pretty funny.

We had such a lovely day at the elephant park, and I could go on for years about some of the abuse some of them have had to suffer. Like one elephant that can only walk on 3 legs because she trod on a landmine and can't use the fourth one. Or one elephant that broke both her leg and spine from years of work. It's really terrible which is why the nature park is doing such good work and is such a lovely place to visit. We both came away wanting to go back, they do a programme where you can live at the park for a week and be a volunteer, but it costs quite a lot and we're running out of time with our visas so may not get a chance to do it. Maybe next week, maybe next year! It's definately a place I would recommend anyone comes to see if they get the chance:
http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/index.htm

We also took 2 days out of Chiangmai to visit my friend Emily from college at a school she works at:

http://www.threegeneration.org/

It was lovely, and very chilled out! We rode bikes and went swimming and enjoyed a massage from the legendary one eyed lady and her mate, emergency back-up. Staying in Chiangmai this weekend to try and sort out some elephant volunteering and to visit the Sunday market again before heading to Laos next week via minibus and longtail boat.

Phew, that was long. Done.