Day 5 - Elephant Sanctuary: Part Two

Benji and I got up a little earlier than usual to make it in time for the 7 am breakfast at the Elephant Nature Park. Although the room was super nice, we found the bed was incredibly uncomfortable and neither of us slept very well. It didn’t matter though, because we were both energized with excitement for our second day with the elephants!

Breakfast was a little less exciting than the previous meals. It was mostly western fare. I think Benji had some eggs and “sausage” (hot dog) and toast, I think I just had toast and maybe some cereal. We didn’t even have time to finish our coffee before we headed out on our next walk at 7:40! We were given canvas bags and followed our tour guide, Gun, to the elephant food storage room. There were shelves upon shelves of bananas and squash. We were told to fill up our bags with however much we could carry. We then followed Gun on a walk past our cabins where we slept. We then put our food bags up onto the second floor of one of the buildings. We weren’t sure why at first, and then a big herd of elephants (about 10 of them) walked *right* by us. We had to put our bags up there so that the elephants didn’t smell the food on us and try to approach. 

After the elephants walked by, we grabbed our bags and began following them on a walk even further back down the path. Eventually, we got to a clearing and the mahouts broke the big herd into two smaller groups. One of the groups only had two elephants, and the other had a larger group. Our tour group with Gun stopped with the two elephants, and the other tour group that was led by Pim went with the other group. Once we stopped, we were able to feed the two elephants from the food in our bags. It was so cool. They are such gentle creatures - it was really cool to feed them while standing on the ground with them (versus the previous day when we were up on the platform). You could look them in the eye and feel like they were watching you while they ate. The coolest thing was watching them eat a squash. On the previous day, the squash was all broken up into smaller pieces. This day, we fed them squash whole, which resulted in very large “crunch” noises. Their mouths must be so powerful! It was awesome and hilarious to watch. 

After we were done feeding them, the elephants were very calm and at ease, so we took advantage of the situation and took a number of pictures with them. Finally, we decided to give them a break and went to check out the other big group of elephants with Pim’s tour group. This was a particularly large group; I believe there were 8 elephants in the herd, ranging from very young (I think one was about 5 years old) to relatively old (I think the oldest of the group may have been 60 or 70). We were told at this point that one of the elephants in that group was in a mood that day, so we shouldn’t get very close. One of the elephants in that group had a gray colored eye, which Gun told us “was very special”. I thought maybe it was because she was blind, but Gun said she was just born that way. Most elephants have brown eyes, so perhaps it was a genetic mutation. After a while of just watching those elephants, we went back to the sanctuary hall for a quick break to rest and drink a coffee.

After our break, we took our final walk out into the large portion of the park (the afternoon walk was in the back portion, along the river). We went over to a herd with two young male babies. This group was known to be the alpha herd because two of the mothers/nannies were the biggest and meanest in the park. We learned that the two male babies had very similar names, something like Khao Loi and Khao Soi (those weren’t their names, but they were similar like that, with only a letter being off). Khao Loi was beloved by many nannies, both within their herd and among all elephants in the park. The other baby, Khao Soi, was not very loved and only one of the nannies looked after him. After watching the herd for a bit, a food truck came out and dumped a ton of squash onto the ground for them to eat. The elephants huddled up and began feasting. This allowed us to get a little closer and take some great pictures of the group. It seemed as though all the best photo ops occurred while the elephants were happily eating away! Not a bad strategy. Eventually, one of the male babies started walking towards us, so we had to distance ourselves. 

After that, we did one final lap of the elephant park. We walked past our bungalows one more time back to the river. Once there, Gun and Pim told us about the elephants there, and their maladies. There were three of them and each one had been injured badly at one point. They now formed their own little family and looked out for and loved one another. One of them had stepped on a land mine and was very nervous about eating around people because that put her in a vulnerable state, so they had to protect her so she could eat alone. The other two were able to eat with us, but they had their own special diets and way of eating. One of them had been hit with a car and afterwards developed a terrible stomach infection and needed to eat a special diet of watermelon. The other elephant was completely blind, and required to have her trunk petted while feeding to let her know that you are there and gentle. Both elephants were very sweet while we were feeding them. After lunch, they moseyed into the river. It was very apparent then how much they took care of one another because the two elephants with the hip injury and foot injury flanked the sides of the blind elephant to make sure she was ok in the water. It was very cute.

By around 2:00 PM, we made our way back to the elephant sanctuary hall and gathered our things to go. We said goodbye to the other people on the tour and our tour guides, and boarded our vans to take us back to Chiang Mai.

Once back in Chiang Mai, we checked into our new hostel, Counting Sheeps, and got a couple of beers to lounge in their common area and decompress from the day. We felt tired but happy. After a bit of relaxing, we went to grab one more drink before dinner at a place called John’s Place, in honor of John Bussiere. For dinner, we decided to go to another restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet called Dash. There was quite a long wait, but we weren’t terribly hungry at this point so it was manageable. For dinner we had some spring rolls, eggplant with red chilis and green curry - all very good! Once full and happy, we made our way home (with a quick stop for some frozen yogurt because we needed something sweet), and then fell quickly asleep.