It was an early morning start for our activity of the day which would no doubt be an experience we would remember for a long time. Seeing elephants was something that was on our list to do in Asia and having read about the treatment of elephants we decided the only ethical way spend some time with them was also the most expensive. Originally I had only though we would go for a ride on an elephant and Charlotte had joked that she wanted to spend a day learning to be an elephant trainer, which is exactly what the day we had booked was. We were supposed to join a group of 20 but the main session was fully booked so instead of booking us to a different day the arranged a private session for us.
When we arrived at Ban Chang (Translates to “Home of Elephants”) the owner of the park sat down with us and told us about the park, its vision and future plans. This guy is so passionate about his elephants having rescued them all from old lives logging and walking city streets. The little presentation he gave was quite moving and at points I thought he was about to shed a tear. It was also important for understand the history of elephants in the region and why they need to have rescue centres and the cost involved, for us to appreciate why we had to pay so much to visit.
The first contact with the elephants is aimed at getting them to like you so we were given a couple of hundred bananas to feed herd. In a usual session two people would feed one elephant but because we had our private session two of us got to feed about 18 of them. Its quite a daunting task at fist approaching a group of elephants with bunches of bananas especially as we were told to put them in their mouths and not let them take them with their trunk. Thankfully each elephant at the park has its own mahout (elephant trainer) to keep them nice and calm and not trample us. Every time you would walk past one it would reach out with its trunk and try and playfully pull you over to feed it.
It took about 15 minutes for us to hand out all the bananas and by the end we were fairly comfortable approaching the giants animals. Just as we were feeling at ease the anxiety levels went back up again when we actually had to learn how to ride them. This wasn't exactly going to be a ride at Disney land as there would be no seat to sit on or handle to hold on to. Although daunting to start with it was actually fairly easy to learn how to command our elephant to lie down so we could climb on its neck, and then getting it to walk, stop, turn left and right weren't much problem either. I found it really amazing how easy it was to control such a powerful animal.
Moving on at a very quick pace having only just had one go each at walking our elephant in a figure of eight we were then ready to go for a longer ride up into the mountains. One of the benefits of having a private session was the tour guide became our own private photographer who seemed to have walked the track so many times he knew where to take all the best shots.
Once we had finished out round trip up and down the mountain we need to take the elephant for a bath. Having ridden her into a lake we had to give her a good clean throwing buckets over water and scrubbing with brushes. The end of the bath was also the queue for the end of our condensed crash course in becoming a mahout. As I predicted it really was something I don't think I will forget for a long, long time. All the elephants seem so happy and playful at the park and I really hope the owner can fulfil his dreams of rescuing more elephants and expanding the park to give them even better living conditions.
The day after the elephants was a fairly lazy day in Chiang Mai except for moving to a new hostel. The old one seemed to be making me too ill so we upgraded to a far nicer place to an extra fee of £1 each a night.
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