Elephant Sanctuary

Long day ahead!

I joined a tour to explore Chiang Mai, or more accurately, the area around the city.

First stop – and my favourite – the elephant sanctuary.

The elephants there were rescued from their former place, meaning they were either used for work (felling trees) or for tourism (people riding elephants).

Due to animal welfare campaigns and shifting consumer demand, many commercial camps and sanctuaries have abandoned elephant riding. It’s not yet officially outlawed in Thailand and can still be done, though.

The sanctuary our group went to is progressive and advocates for animal (elephant) rights.

Once at the sanctuary, surrounded by mountainous rainforest, you get a blue shirt to put on – apparently, the elephants are conditioned to expect food from people dressed in blue. I fondly gazed at my reflection. I must say, jeans blue suits me. 😁

We were warned what to do and what not to do. I was happy to hear they take the welfare of the animals seriously. Also, considering an elephant weighs 4 tons (I should know…), you might not want to give in to tomfoolery around them.

You also get a bag that you can comfortably wear around your shoulder, filled with plenty of little bananas to feed the elephants.

We were told that they consider bananas a special treat and that they’re not part of their routine diet – to avoid diabetes. Also, since they have to eat about a tenth of their body weight daily (I could get behind that…), that would be a lot of bananas! 400 kg, in fact. (Though, I do wonder – they get tourists quite frequently, and I’m sure they all feed them bananas…)

The elephants are in a fenced area, but they can easily get out by walking through an elephant-sized opening. 😁

They had 3 elephants there that day (that number is prone to change, as they have several camps spread throughout the rainforest and the elephants are free to move between them).

One of them was said to be particularly cheeky and destructive – a 14-year-old teen – another one a 35-year-old, and an elder, around 56 years old, all of them females.

You hold out the banana by the stem and let the elephant do the rest.

They grab it with their trunks and devour it within fractions of a second. And then the trunk will poke you for more. My bananas went to the hungry teen and I was out in about 1 minute. Geez!

They just couldn’t accept that soon we all were out of bananas. So, they walked out of the fenced area and tried to ask us more directly. It was cute, honestly. They particularly poked one of the workers there with their trunks rather relentlessly.

The elephants accepted that there would be no more bananas and started to walk to the muddy river with us. It’s a bit odd when you’re sharing a path with an elephant and just quickly make way for it to walk ahead of you. 😁

Once we got to the river, the elephants requested a bath. We were given a little plastic bowl with which we doused the elephants with river water.

This was also around the time when we were told to stay away from their behinds, as the digestion window was progressing to the end stage, slowly but surely.

The bathing came to an end and our grey friends moved to a muddy spot to put on some SPF 50+.

And that was about it. We had a yummy lunch (Pad Thai), and that’s when we were reminded of monsoon season having started. That was a lot of rain! It looked scenic from our roofed lunch spot.

It turned less scenic fast once we had to walk back to the car…Read more