With seemingly hundreds of elephant tours near Chiang Mai it’s hard to know which ones are any good and treat the animals well. We went to a place that doesn’t do the standard elephant trekking rides, but instead is hanging out with rescued elephants that are living in a more natural way. The Elephant Nature Park has 35 elephants that have land to roam on and are all roaming free. There’s no rides, but you still get plenty of interaction with the elephants.
When we got there we fed the elephants from a huge bucket of fruit. This was the first of many feedings. It’s really cool to see up close how they use their trunks to do everything. After the feeding we went for a walk out in the field to get to know some elephants. I really liked that our guide was able to tell us every elephant’s story of how they got there, what their personality was, which elephant herd they were a part of and more. Some of the stories were very sad, but it’s apparent that the elephants there are much better off than they were before.
Lunch was a huge buffet, and almost all vegetarian. It’s really great to see a place that takes conservation seriously on every level, down to the food that’s served to guests. They also buy the food for the people and guests from local farmers, and volunteers appear to do much of the cooking and work around the place.
After lunch is when the real fun started. We went down to the river and gave an elephant a bath, sloshing buckets of water onto the elephant and then using a scrub brush to get them clean. They have remarkably thick skin for us to use the giant bristle brushes we did. One of the elephants named Hope is a trouble maker, so when it was announced that he was coming down to the river we had to leave. We climbed up a platform and watched Hope go for a swim. Then we got to know some more elephants, one of which repeatedly gave Geneveve kisses with her sloppy wet trunk. Geneveve loved this.
The founder of the center, a small Thai women called Lek, talked to the group of tourists about the work that was happening and the challenges that ‘domesticated’ elephants in Thailand face. Even though elephants are a protected animal in Thailand, that protection is only for the dwindling wild population, whereas the elephants that are owned have no more protection than livestock. We learned about the awful hazing rituals used to break the elephants for domestication, and how the elephants are often mistreated to make a buck with tourists. It’s definitely the kind of info that you don’t get from most tourist packages out of Chiang Mai.
We almost considered taking a few extra days to volunteer at the center, but it is relatively expensive, and there were other parts of Thailand we wanted to see. I highly recommend coming here if you want an experience with elephants that’s different that what the other 99% of tourists get in Thailand.