I honestly needed a rest day. I spent most of the morning booking stuff for my next stops in Krabi, Phuket, Bangkok and Tokyo…flights, boats, taxis, hotels, and events. Then I got up and walked over to Hard Rock Café for a location pin and lunch, and wandered around a few temples I missed a couple days ago. My back has been sore from all of the long flights, so I popped into another massage parlor for a delightfully painful deep tissue massage, one of the best I’ve ever had. Then I went back to the hotel and read some of my book on the balcony. I wanted to go to the night bazaar, and sat at the end of my bed dressed for it, but then decided I really didn’t feel like putting shoes on and crawled into bed to watch a random Netflix anime that popped up. I really liked Chiang Mai, but I think I need to come back in like January or February when it’s not so hot!
This is it. Today is the day! The entire reason why I came to Chiang Mai! Before coming here I did a lot of research trying to find an elephant sanctuary that was legit, ethical, and had a great reputation. Elephant Nature Park kept coming up again and again as the Number 1 option, so I booked a day with them. I got up early, had some toast and coffee, and walked to the main office just down the street from my hotel. There were 7 of us in my group, and we hopped in a van and headed about an hour north of the city to the sanctuary. Once there we lathered up in sunscreen and 95% DEET bug spray (northern Thailand is somewhat of a malaria zone) put on their uniforms and started chopping melons and mixing up elephant sweet snackies. After making the snackies, we rolled them into balls and fed them to the three elephants we were going to be with for the day to make friends with them. Meadow was the biggest and oldest at 70 years old and the leader of the trio. Touchdown was 55 years old and second largest, and “little” Saitan was 45 years old and a bit of a diva.
See, the elephants associated with this particular park are all rescue, rehabilitation and (sometimes) release animals. They rescue elephants used in the circus, tourism industry, and logging industry and nurse them back to health. Ones that can be trained to self-care are released into a protected space in the park. Unfortunately the release part is rare since no one that privately owns an elephant wants to give it away while it’s still useful. So most of the 300 elephants in this sanctuary are either very old (the oldest being 103) or they are disabled in some way (for example, Meadow is blind in her right eye) so the owners could no longer make money off of them. Once they can’t make money, they sell them to the park (kind of a ballsy move if you ask me) or just chain them somewhere until they starve, or they outright kill and eat them. Anyway, they were kept in their big pen while we fed them otherwise they’d trample us to get to the food. The elephants here have no ropes or chains so the only reason they have to follow us is food, it’s all positive reinforcement. All three had been part of the illegal logging trade before being sold for tourist rides and you could still see the scars on their heads and where they had no hair on their backs from the saddles, so at this park they only use food to train them what to do for care and comfort. After they ate their snackies, we fed them bananas just to bribe them into liking and following us even more, then we set off into the jungle.
We walked up and around towards the river, then sat down under some trees where they ate corn while we listened to our guide tell us about them and the park. On our way to the park we passed by some elephants with people on their backs, and our guide said there were multiple parks here and not all of them were ethical or for the good of the animals. A lot of them are for profit. For example, at another point we saw a different group of tourists with two other elephants in the river and those two had ropes around their necks and the tourists were laughing and climbing all over them. All we could do was look down and watch, those people chose the exploitative tour that costs 2,000 baht rather than the conservation tour that cost 6,000 baht. Our guide just kept shaking his head when people in our group asked who those people were and how they were allowed to do that, and just said in Thailand if it makes money with tourists then they’re going to keep doing it.
ENP lets the elephants decide what they want to do, about halfway through our time Touchdown decided she wanted to be by herself, so she left the other two and wandered off for a couple hours and they let her. Eventually Meadow was the one that called her back with that low guttural sound they make, and she came out of the woods nearby and stayed with us again. Around lunchtime we left the elephants to do their thing and hiked up to a lookout point with spectacular views for a veggie and noodles lunch and sat around and talked for about an hour and a half. It was the hottest point of the day so they kept us in the shade with food and water (much like the elephants below) until the sun moved off a little bit. Then we headed back down to where the elephants were and went into the river to splash around and feed them bananas. I didn’t go in the water too much, just enough for some photos, because the bottom was really rocky, the current was fast, and I just kept thinking about what was in there and ewwwww! We dried off and walked back to our starting point, said farewell to our three girls, and hopped in the van to the main nature park area.
The main park isn’t just an elephant sanctuary, they also rescue hundreds of dogs, cats, water buffalo, cows, goats, and chickens. There was an animal everywhere you looked! Our guide took us down to the elephant portion and walked us around a huge open air enclosure and introduced us to almost all of the elephants. He knew their histories, temperament, ages, and ailments and kept us away from them since the ones in this area they were hoping to one day release and they didn’t want them directly interacting with people. He took us back to the penned area where the sick and disabled elephants were, including the 103 year old elephant, a new elephant they had just rescued 4 months ago that had been starving and was still under quarantine, and another elephant that had his front leg maimed by a trap and was still undergoing treatment with the hope it might heal enough to walk on again someday. On the way back to the bus, lo and behold the founder of Elephant Nature Park who is typically traveling to spread the word about elephant conservation just happened to be there today and sitting and talking with people. So I approached and shook her hand and thanked her for all that’s she’s done for the hundreds of animals just in this park, let alone the entire elephant rescue network she’s built throughout southeast Asia over the past 20 years. What an incredible woman! Everyone pretty much slept for the ride back to the city and I took a deep scrub shower as soon as I got back to my room. I have a free day tomorrow but it’s supposed to rain, so I’ll have to figure something out. This ranks second only to the shark diving for this year though so far!
I was still pretty beat from the trip over so I snoozed my alarm that went off at 9am and didn’t wake up until housekeeping came knocking at 10:30. At which point I finally got up, showered, and headed out the door. My first stop was Wat Phantao, but it was under renovation so there wasn’t too much to see. Next stop was Wat Chedi Luang, but they wanted a fee to get in and women weren’t allowed inside the temple buildings. Kinda dumb to have to pay a full fee but only get to do half the stuff because you were born with a vagina, so I took some pictures of the outside and left. I ain’t up for that full priced misogyny even if it is cultural. On my way to the next stop, I passed by a pad thai place so I took a seat and had some delicious chicken pad thai and hydrated up, then continued to Wat Phra Singh and this one was really cool. You could go into all the areas, everything was covered with gold plate/leaf, and some of their statues and buildings dated from around 700 years ago. They also had these plaques with popular wisdoms and phrases all over the place that were neat to walk through and read, plus they had temple cats to pet. The next stop was a little over a mile away and in the 90+ degree heat I didn’t feel like walking so I took one of those “crash waiting to happen” red taxi zippy cars to Wat Suan Dok. At that temple, the buildings with the relics were are all painted pure white, with the gold plated main temple and pagoda on one side. The contrast was really stunning, and I paid the fee to get in the temple to see their three massive Buddha statues. The monks were all out walking around too, but I wasn’t sure if taking pictures of them was allowed so I didn’t, but man there are a LOT of them in this city. While I was walking around there were a few other smaller temples I stopped in too, but I didn’t catch all of their names. After Suan Dok, I decided it was time to go back to the hotel to cool down for an hour before I went for my night tours, and I eventually found a red taxi of death back to the hotel.
The Full Moon Company small group tour picked me up at my hotel, and drove us first to Wat Umong Suan Phutthatham which was built about 630 years ago, and wasn’t much to look at outside since war, earthquakes, and typhoons had worn everything down or collapsed it. But underground were a series of tunnels and temples for the monks to get around and meditate in absolute dark and silence, once only lit up by candles. There were elaborate decorations and paintings on the walls in the past, and some of the frescos were still there since they were in the dark so long. Our final stop was Wat Doi Suthep, the temple on the mountain, following a little zig-zaggy road all the way up. Our group decided to be lazy and take the tram up to the top rather than going up the 306 step naga stairway, and we spent about 45 minutes walking around, taking pictures, enjoying the gorgeous city views from that elevation, and completing our three laps around the pagoda before making a wish per tradition. The only other single traveling girl and I opted to walk down the naga steps rather than take the tram down, and I guess the line for the tram was long because we all ended up getting down to the base at about the same time. The drive back to the hotel was uneventful, although there was a very nice older German man in the group and we were yapping about cameras, and how travel has changed with social media and cell phones, and how much we all hated Trump (everyone joined in on that topic, there was a consensus between the German, Singapore, Philippines and Thai folks and they kept looking at me to explain and I was just like…I don’t fucking know. Hate and fear are powerful, I guess.) Anyway, tomorrow is elephant day, gotta get up EARLY in the morning…somehow.
