Landed, grabbed our bags and baa-chang elephant park was waiting for us with a sign with our names. Our driver delivered us to the pickup point and we had 30 minutes to go around the corner and pick up something from the coffee shop. Andrea grabbed a strawberry smoothie for 1$ then our van picked us up and I crawled into the back inbetween two american girls for our hour ride to the elephant park. Meghan and Shantelle were on a month long tour of southeast asia with their friend jody (sitting near the front). We talked about travels the entire way. Then we pulled into the park with 21 elephants hanging out in the yard. They had one leg buckled down with about 6 feet of room to move each. Tom our guide gave us the low down including the requirements to wear their ugly denim jump suits as we will get dirty. Changed and got our lesson on elephants.
Each one has its own mahut who is that particular elephants trainer. They are all asian elephants. There were 3 babies, 5,7,10 years old and the oldest elephant is 38. Each elephant has its own personality and some are more timid/aggressive than others. We then were let lose to feed the elephants bamboo shoots and bunches of bananas they just ate whole. U held out the item and they wrapped their trunk around it. We had five huge baskets to feed the elephants. Who eat 200kg a day each. Some were given more distance from their mahuts than others. We could even get our pictures taken with some. Then after feeding time it was time to learn how to get on the elephant. "Nalung" is the command for the to lay down so you can jump on bareback. And then we did just that with 2 elephants. Their skin is so tough and their hair is spiky-- its a good thing we had denim on.
Next we had to learn how to direct them. "Bye is forward, how is stop and pang is turn. We then climbed up and had them walk us around. It was like riding a huge slow moving horse. You hold onto the ears as you climb on/off otherwise u just balance with your hands on the head. It was pretty crazy to be riding bareback on such a huge animal! After learning how to ride we cleaned up and had an awesome fresh cooked sweet and sour chicken served over rice and delicious soup and fresh cut pinneapple for dessert. Then we went and took a little nap in the hammocks (making sure our feet were pointed away from the spirit box) until the elephants were ready for their ride.
We then hopped on our elephants and walked through the forest. Each had a mahut very close by. My elephant needed to be drug a lot by our mahut. And he even needed to be hit a few times. Poor elephant. He scratched his body against numerous trees and tried eating everything. Downhill was incredibly hard. My triceps were burning! Plus the elephant waddle made it difficult to stay on! We took a break about 15 minutes in. Some of the little elephants climbed on the backs of other little elephants. Then we climbed back on our elephants for the other 15 minutes and hopped off of them right at the water hole. We took off our shoes, emptied our pockets and hopped in the elephant poop filled water hole to scrub down our elephants. We had floor brushes and buckets of water. A few elephants came up behind me and squirted water at me through their noses. GROSS!! Haha then after about 15 minutes playing in the waterhole we said goodbye and went up to shower. We were given clean towels and bath stalls to use. Water pressure was horrible but we had a guest house to go to to shower later. Turned in our wet clothes (thank goodness we were wearing their clothes!) And took the van an hour back to the city.
Upon being dropped off at our guest house, andrea got an hour long thai massage and lori got an hour long foot massage. We also booked the events for tomorrow: flight of the gibbons ziplining, and our own car to bring us to the tiger kingdom where you go pet tigers, and a trip up to the white elephant temple high on the hill, then delivery to the airport. We then went to the night market and bought way too much! Returned home by 930 pm, andrea showered the rest of the elephant poopy water out and fell asleep for our early 630AM van pickup out to the chang mai rainforest. Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
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