chang - elephant

asian elephants enjoying their natural habitat

if you ever find yourself in chiang mai or anywhere else in northern thailand make a point of seeing the elephant nature park. an hour north of the city in a valley of the rainforest is a piece of land that serves as home for 33 wounded or abandoned elephants. lek, the founder of the program, is a small (lek means small in thai) woman who was raised in a northern hill tribe village. she had an elephant as a pet growing up and came to love them so much that when the logging industry put domesticated elephants out of work and on the street with beggars, she took them in to fix their wounds and help them adapt to a more natural environment.

we knew we wanted to see elephants, as they are the national symbol of thailand, but we also knew that our tourist baht was being used in some pretty exploitative ways. when we found this place we thought it sounded more humane than most elephant "farms" so we took a chance on an all day tour. we are so glad we did. it was amazing.

on the way to the park our guide, mammoth "king of the elephants" (said with an infectious grin), took us to the market where we and our tourmates loaded literally tons of fruit onto several pickup trucks. he said it was our morning exercise. it was. then we watched a documentary about the elephant park and the wild elephant's plight in thailand. i got a little car sick but the ride was worth it when we finally arrived at the location of the park. there are nearby elephant farms that had elephants wearing rediculous garb and seats on their backs for tourists. but when we pulled into the elephant nature park the giant creatures were roaming free in the grass grazing - as they do 18 hours a day. we got to feed the elephants from atop a bamboo platform, then have a fantastic thai lunch for ourselves. then the fun began.

wading in a river with frolicking 6 ton animals is not something i thought i would ever do. now it is virtually all i want to do. we were given a bucket and a scrub brush and told, bathe the elephants, but only on the bum and back. all of my experience with elephants is in the zoo where they stand in the water or spray themselves. never have i seen one elephant run into the water jump on a friend and roll around like a little kid. also, when an elephant is done bathing, so are you, or else you get charged out of the water. it was scary and fantastic - and we got to do it twice! (shortly before this our camera ran out of batteries - of course - but we made some lovely friends who will send us fun elephant bathing pictures soon.)

during our down time - the elephants can only take so much human interaction - we hiked the grounds. here we saw a few males who are still adjusting to the freedom and are a little aggressive so they are kept seperate, and a 3 week old baby elephant with its mother. it was the size of our dog. so cute!

every rescued animal has a story, but the teenage boy elephant dan and i got to feed has a somewhat different story from the others. he is the only resident who was born in the wild. when he was just a few months old his mother wandered onto a corn field and was shot while foraging. days later the villagers found the baby and called lek. she came right away and brought him to the park by way of a pickup truck dressed up to look more like the forest. she fed and cared for him around the clock. she named him hope. lek and hope have developed a strong bond over time but he had never seen humans before being found by the villagers, who put him in a cage. now, at 8 years old, he is still a bit wild. he has a precocious personality, refusing to eat certian cuts of watermelon from dan and me, and later running off into the bushes away from his mahout (trainer/companion).

hope deigns to eat a bunch of bananas

the younger animals, aside from hope, have a very positive association with humans now since so much of their lives have been spent at the park. any training done is more like you would do with a dog - positive reinforcement training. the 3 and 4 year old elephants can kiss you on the cheek or spray you with water on command (both of which they did to me) but are never touched by their mahouts. they are given bread as a reward. i believe most of this training is done to show more traditional thais, who believe that elephants are animals to be domesticated, that training can be done in more humane ways. (we saw video of the old way, which involves brutally torturing the animal into submission. it was very hard to watch.)

dan and i only wished that we had realized, before coming to thailand, that we could have spent days or weeks on site volunteering. there are programs for youth, and huts with running water for families. imagine getting to hike with the elephants up the mountain, learning the personalities of these magnificent creatures, and getting to know the mahouts and their craft. if you ever consider engaging in an elephant experience i would recommend you avoid trekking expeditions that use seats, and bareback expeditions can be just as bad, don't give money to a street beggar with an elephant, and do check out lek's sanctuary. we are elephant nature park converts.