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!
