Elephantes!

Today was elephant day with a visit to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. This place was absolutely, and this has made for the best day yet on the tour and maybe the trip alone! We spent the better half of the day at the park and it was an amazing experience!

The day started off with a visit to some of the mahouts and their elephants to pet and see them interacting. The mahouts are Thai men who believe that they were born with the duty to care for an elephant and are assigned to an elephant early on in life, and remain together until either of them dies. It is pretty spectacular to see the two parties interact and how well they can communicate with the elephants understanding many of the Thai commands and motions. Apparently, the mahouts are unable to marry without the elephants approval of the woman first which brings a whole new light to the asking for permission part of the proposal...


The park even has a two-year old orphan who was rescued in the wild and brought to the conservation center which was quite amazing to interact with. While many of the elephants were quite 'naughty' as described by their mahouts, we got to pet, photograph and interact with all of the various elephants around the park for the better part of the morning. 



After this it was time for elephant group bath time in the lake to prepare for show time...


We then followed the parade of elephants as they proceeded to the show area tail in trunk the whole way through with even the baby joining in on the procession...

During the show, the elephants went through the various tasks that they were used for throughout Thailand including the pulling, pushing, kicking and just general transportation of logs and other materials, as well as some other tricks that their mahouts had taught them. These included balancing and adult male elephant on a log and having a myriad of pictures painted. Of the paintings there were flower abstracts and self portraits...needless to say it was pretty amazing to witness.

Following the presentation, we were off for an elephant ride around the parks with the company of the mahout and set out around the center....

After, we were off to play with some elephant dung and try our hand at making dung paper on site... mine was pretty bad...

Finally, our last adventure with the elephants involved a venture next door to the elephant hospital to visit some of their patients. One of them happened to be a seven month old baby elephant brought to the center with his mom as he was born a day premature and because of it wasn't able to utilize his mother's milk...

Others included this guy who suffered a broken leg after falling down a mountain as well as a large group that had been injured by land mines along the Burma/Thailand border. Unfortunately, their excursions along the border had cost many of the wild elephants their legs as they stepped on the mind, but after arriving to the hospital, they were able to be fitted with a prosthetic leg to help return some normalcy to their lives...


As we eventually had to leave the park, we made one last stop at the local pineapple farm along the road to get some great pictures of Jon jumping and plants a'growin'... This place was actually quite shocking as I admittedly had no idea this was how pineapples grew.

Sorry for such a long one with a myriad of pictures but the elephant experience was quite amazing and a once in a lifetime experience!! If you ever find yourself wandering the streets and neighborhoods of Thailand you have to make a pit-stop here for a day!