Chandra here to cover my favorite part of our Chiang Mai trip-- our visit to the Elephant Nature Park. Our fabulous travel agent (aka Paul) found this great park that is a sanctuary for abused, injured, retired, abandoned, and orphaned elephants (though some babies have been born here so they don't all have sad histories). You can visit for a day trip up to many weeks if you'd like and stay on the property and roll up your sleeves to help out. It was about an hour van ride from our hotel and as soon as you drive up, you can see the elephants roaming around. The park has about 30 elephants and they roam around in groups of 5-6. They are mostly female with only 3 or so males.
These first pictures are taken from the main lodge that was our home base for the day. It's wide open all the way around and elevated so you can be face to face with the elephants. They just walk up as they please to check you out or to eat if you have a bucket of fruit or veggies handy. The kids loved feeding them watermelon, cucumber and bananas. They were skittish of the strong grasping trunks at first, but by the end of the day Esme couldn't get enough of feeding them.
A short video clip of feeding mini bananas. They are so dextrous with their trunks!
After feeding the elephants their mid-morning snack and getting an overview of the park and interesting elephant facts from our volunteer guide, we headed out from the lodge for a walk around the park. When walking among freely roaming elephants the rules to keep in mind are: 1) never walk between two elephants as you may get squished, and 2) watch out behind you as they are quiet walkers and can sneak up on you. There is no riding of the elephants here. Since they all (except the babies born here) have had hard lives prior to coming here, they get to do whatever they want now.
We met this old lady on our way to meet the new baby. How do you tell if an elephant is old? The older ones have more pink spots on their ears and the divots above their eyes are more sunken in. I can't remember if this one was the oldest one or not, but there is one that is in her upper 80's.
Next stop was to meet the newest baby, only one month old! The mama and baby were in a large pen to keep visitors away from the baby to keep the mama at ease. The baby was sooooo cute, I would have loved to have gotten in there to give her a big hug. Those tiny ears! The little fuzzy head! The tiny trunk! Sigh.
As we were hanging out with the mom and babe, this big gal was standing behind us helping herself to a drink from the hose. You can kind of see in the picture that her back legs look shorter than her front legs. She used to work in the city and has dislocated hips from a traffic accident and walked with a pronounced hitch in her step.
Here you can see some of the surrounding hills and scenery as we walked around. The long hut-like structure was an elevated walkway that was connected to the main lodge with seating areas for good views of the grounds, mud pit and river. It was a hot, hot day as you may be able to tell from Esme's flushed face.
The elephants love to get muddy and use it as sunscreen. Watch out as they fling it up on their backs.
At lunch time the lodge set up a yummy vegetarian Thai buffet and all of a sudden we were eating with loads of people we hadn't seen around earlier in the day. There were many college kids in veterinary programs there for longer term visits to help out in the clinic (for elephants and also for the dog sanctuary and some other animals) and other volunteers. After a leisurely lunch, it was time to head down to the river to help bathe the elephants. Here they come lumbering down to the river.
This next picture cracks me up as Paul took charge of washing the elephant's ass. Right after I snagged this picture the guide told Paul standing behind an elephant wasn't a good idea.
To be clear, the elephants are perfectly capable of bathing themselves, but they enjoyed us cooling them off with water while we pretended we were actually helping.
After the elephant bathing we had some free time to relax on the veranda with iced tea and say hi to passing elephants. Then came the educational video/documentary on the history of the founder and how she started the park and some of her rescues. There was also footage of how brutally elephants are trained in order to be used as loggers, transportation, amusement/money makers on Thailand city streets. Too graphic for the kids and this softy so we left the movie room at that point (we were forewarned when was a good time to leave). It was good timing as we got to see a group of elephants, including one of the older babies, show up at the river to play around. After they were done, they were wooed up to this slope with big bushels of green grass so people could have a nice photo op. The third one over is one of the older babies born at the park.
After that it was time to head back to town for much needed pool time to cool down (and a good scrubbing after the kids really got into playing around in the mucky river). We loved our day with the elephants and would highly recommend a visit to this park to anyone headed to Thailand. I'll leave you with one last pic, one of my favorites of this old girl checking me out. Maybe she was giving me that look because earlier in the day I had asked if she was pregnant....turns out she's just fat. Whoops. And elephants never forget.
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