Day 4 - Elephant Sanctuary: Part One

Benji and I woke up early to pack our things and eat our final breakfast at Namamema before heading to the elephant sanctuary. I have my first bought of Bangkok Belly, so wasn’t feeling too keen on the traditional Thai breakfast they offered that day (chicken soup), and opted just for a piece of toast and some fruit. At 8:30, the van picked us up to head to the elephant sanctuary.

In the van, there were six other people, but we didn’t all get acquainted until later in the day. On the 1.5 hour van ride to the sanctuary, we watched an introductory video on how to safely interact with the elephants - never directly front of or directly behind, and do not tease them with food. After the safety video, they played a documentary made about Thai elephants, and specifically about the woman who founded Elephant Nature Park. It was pretty interesting, but I also was interested in gazing out the window and watching the beautiful jungle scenery go by.

Once we got to the sanctuary, we immediately started seeing elephants and the excitement finally set in. We dropped off our things in the main sanctuary hall, had a few introductory words from our tour guides, Job and Mousey, and then we almost immediately got to feed the elephants. It was amazing! We fed them bananas, kombucha squash (or something like it), and pineapples. The first few elephants we saw came in a hurry, and left in a hurry. It didn’t seem like they liked standing around the house very long. 

After they bounded off, we got to take our first walk through the park. We saw a number of “families”, who may not have necessarily been blood related, but had bonded at some point and moved like a herd. Each elephant had a trainer, or mahout, that looked after it. Benji noted that all the mahouts were men, which we found interesting. After researching it later, we found that being a mahout is known to be a more male dominated profession for some reason, and that training to be a mahout begins at a very early age. 

The families varied in size, from having six, seven or even eight elephants, to sometimes only two. It also seemed like the families that were grouped together generally were in similar stages in healing. There was one family, for example, that they call the disabled family because all of the elephants have some sort of malady, or are very old. The two oldest elephants they pointed out were 83 and 100 years old! We learned the elephants age similarly to humans, in that their skin gets much more wrinkled over time, their bones start to protrude more (again a symptom of thinning skin), and they also begin to shrink. 

We learned that there were only a couple of baby elephants (baby meaning up to about 5 years of age) that were born in the park. One of them was born there because the mother was rescued while she was pregnant (unbeknownst to them, as it is hard to tell whether a female is pregnant), and the other was born after a male and female “played” in the river together, and their “playing” may have gone a little too far.  😂 All of the babies or young elephants have “nannies”, or mother elephants, some of which are actually the mother, and some of which have adopted the child to look after. It seems as though some of the nannies have favorites and look after them in particular. It was very cool to see how protective the mothers were. If a baby elephant started walking towards us, we immediately had to retreat quickly - the mothers did not like us to be anywhere close to them, even if we weren’t the ones to encroach. 

Lastly, we learned about the differences between Asian elephants and African elephants - Africans are larger, have only one hump, have two “hands” on their trunks, and both males and females can have tusks. Asian elephants are smaller, with two humps, one hand, and only certain males have tusks (it’s hereditary and some males do not). After our long walkabout, we went back to the sanctuary hall and broke for lunch.

Lunch was a huge buffet of a variety of Thai food - curries, rice, noodle dishes, spring rolls, soup and salad. It was delicious and I ate way too much (which was the case for every meal at the elephant sanctuary). Once we ate, we were able to lounge a bit and relax before heading out on our next walkabout. I also took advantage of this time to buy some souvenirs!

On our next walk, we went to see the elephants bathe. We were originally going to the see the big herd go, but we were too slow taking selfies with one particular elephant, and went to watch the disabled family instead. The elephants get in and out of the water fairly quickly, so if you can easily miss the window. When we got over to the disabled family, they slowly but surely made their way into the water. It was really fun to watch them. The youngest of the group, a young male who’s mother was disabled because she got hit by a car before being brought into the park (while pregnant with him), was the first one to get in. After a while, his mom got in too and the two of them played together. It was super fun to watch. The third of the group got in for a bit but then quickly got out and went over to a huge mound of dirt to start covering herself with dirt, which quickly turned to mud. After a bit of playing, the mother and son joined her and also began covering themselves with dirt/mud. It was really interesting to see them use their trunks to spray the dirt over their backs. It looked like they also were playing a bit in the dirt, or at least the young male was being playful with the other two. All the young males seemed very playful. 

After this walk, we went back to the sanctuary hall and had a nice long break. We said good bye to our guides for the first day, Job and Mousey, and met our second hosts that would take over for us on day 2 - Gun and Pim (two females). Although it seemed very early to be done with the elephants, it seems like they do it out of respect for the elephants - not only to give them space from tourists, but even from their mahouts. During the evening and night, the elephants are allowed to be completely on their own. Soon after we got back to the sanctuary hall, Gun showed us to our accommodations for the evening. It was a beautiful big bungalow/cabin along the river, slightly set back away from the sanctuary hall and elephant park. It had a huge room, a large canopy bed, a desk and armoire, a large bathroom, and a back porch overlooking the river - surprisingly nice! Once we put our things down, we took a little while to just lay on the bed and relax - it had already been a very full day full of excitement and awe. Once rested, we got up and went back to the sanctuary hall. We bought a couple of beers and went to the second floor to listen to storytelling time, which was scheduled for 4:30 PM. Once up there, I saw all of the masseuses offering massages and decided to go for my first Thai massage. It was painful but glorious, and only 150 baht (5 USD)! She massaged, prodded, and stretched my body for a whole hour. During this time, the storyteller never showed up, but Benji very happily spent the hour reading and drinking both of our beers 

😂. Once I was done, we bought a couple more beers and relaxed before heading down to eat dinner at 6 PM. Dinner was similar to lunch - curries, noodle dishes and spring rolls - and it also had Khao soi! So good. Again, I completely overate.

After dinner, we both were ready for some downtime, so we headed back to our cabin to do some blogging, reading, and hit the sack early.