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At this very moment Marilyn and I are both online after having finally gotten off of a 14 hour train ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. Marilyn’s first night train wasn’t as diverting as we’d hoped, in her words, she turned to me at 3am this morning and said drearily “Natalie, this is TERRIBLE.” To explain, we had not been able to get a sleeper car, so we were in 2nd class instead. Not so bad since the chairs recline a ton, but when the train finally started moving and they didn’t turn off the lights EVER, and none of the windows closed all the way and we were freezing and wearing the same clothes we’d woken up in 18 hours before…well, it wasn’t a great situation. M said she’d woken up at one point to see me with my arms and head all pulled into my sweatshirt, looking like the headless horseman. That was when the brilliant idea came up to pull out the sleeping bag. Um. Duh. Only after 4 hours of painful “sleep” did we figure that one out. After that, it was just the uncomfortable chairs that deterred us. Luckily for us, our next train ride, only 12 hours this time, has us in sleeper cars. YES!
Anyways. The main thing that I want to catch up on at the moment is our last three days which we spent at Elephant Camp! Woo! The actual title is Elephant Nature Park, and I honestly encourage all of you to google it and check out the main site and consider visiting. It was a fantastic experience, one of the best of my entire life, and if I can scrape together some fundage, I will probably go back in the next month or two after Marilyn leaves on the 25th.
So. We began with the day group, even though we were going to be spending 3 days there. The first day included a lot of information about the camp, about Lek, the founder of the camp and a lot of the back history on all the elephants there. Because most of the elephants have come from abusive backgrounds, it was pretty difficult to hear some stories. Others, like the males, are just harder to handle and require a lot more attention, so they were just sold out of lack of resources. Some of the extremely sad stories include the elephant who stepped on a landmine and got off lucky, only damaging the cartiledge in her back right foot. She will still have an extreme limp forever though. And right now she has an infection in her front left foot, so that just makes walking plain difficult. The alpha male, BK, was drugged and tied down while poachers chopped off one of his tusks, and he wasn’t even completely unconscious yet! They cut it down so far that it will never grow again either. Jokia has a horrible and long story, but the main idea is that she was worked until the day she gave birth to her baby, but when she did, she was tied up on a hill and the newborn rolled to its death. She was then so depressed that she wouldn’t work, even under beatings. So her owner had the brilliant idea of more torture, why don’t we blind the elephant to make her work? That sounds like a fantastic plan. So Jokia is completely blind, but when she arrived at the park Mae Perm, another rescued elephant adopted her as a sister and never leaves her side. Pretty much all of the elephants, since they have been rescued and aren’t real families, have adopted each other and formed family groups, it was really fantastic to see.
More about the camp in general though. The first main order of business was to feed the elephants. They graze all day long, but once a day tons of fruit is brought in from Chiang Mai, it is divided into individual buckets for each elephant and their mahouts bring them to the main feeding platform. There, all the volunteers and visitors help out and feed them for about half an hour. Some of them are so picky too. Hope would only eat bananas, and Jungle Boy would just drop his pineapple on the ground and go for more watermelon.
Next we would go down to the river with the elephants to throw buckets of water over their backs and scrub them down. At first I thought that that was mainly for the visitor’s benefit, but even if an elephant didn’t have a visitor to help out, they would do it themselves, or the mahouts would do it for them. The funny thing was, the second they got out of the water, they would throw dirt all over themselves again, as apparently, elephants are prone to sunburn. Who knew?
Later we watched Vanishing Giants, a National Geographic documentary all about Lek, the camp and elephant training methods in Thailand. It was quite eye opening and I would recommend seeing it. Also, as it was made just 5 years ago or so, a bunch of the elephants on it were still in the camp! I had already fed or at least seen a lot of them.
So for the next few days we were pretty free to do as we wished. We went on jungle walks with mahouts and their elephants, continued feeding and bathing them, and even made friends with several of the Burmese mahouts that were there. Only about 5 of the 30 or so could speak English, but we talked to the ones who could, mostly Zero and Mong, who were in charge of Jungle Boy (Ton Suk) and Mae Kyu. Those elephants are friends, so the mahouts naturally have to spend a lot of time together. (It’s quite a fascinating job, I would love to be a mahout.)
Over those couple of days I got quite attached to the animals, (28 elephants, 30+ dogs, numerous cats, and mice who chewed through the straps on my backpack to get to a smashed up snickers at the bottom) and the people there. I can’t wait to go back. And I truly recommend that everyone looks into it. It was a fabulous program, even if you just get there for one day. But at the end of that first day, I was super glad I didn’t have to leave.
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