After my first 24 hours in Thailand I was ready to write it off as overrated...not nearly as wonderful as everyone kept saying it would be. But after my first week I have forgotten all of the frustration and anxiety my first day brought, and am completely in love with the Elephant Nature Park. It has been everything for me that Bali wasn't (and Bali wasn't even bad for me). It was interacting with pele on a more personal level (rather than being served by the tourism industry), it was having something to do each day, it's playing with animals, it's vegetarian food, and so many other things...
The Elephant Nature Park is a refuge for elephants rescued from their working lives. Lek, the woman who started it has such a huge passion for her elephants and all living things. She started the park 15(ish?) years ago with 5 elephants. Through donations, activism, and volunteers, she has grown the park into a sanctuary for 34 elephants, a herd of water buffalo, 280 dogs, a handful of cats, chickens, a pig, and probably many more animals I'm not even aware of. It also benefits the local community as it provides a number of jobs for people that live there, as well as refugees that have come from Burma. I know this is going to be too cheesy to even read, but it is a place built of love and compassion.
First of all there are the elephants that have been rescued. Any working elephant--circus performing ele's, street begging ele's, ele's that paint, ele's you ride, any elephant--has been through a horrific breaking period where they are beaten into submission until they listen to (fear) their mahout (trainer). (So please, please, please do not support the elephant tourism industry even if they seem well looked after now). Lek has rescued over 30 elephants that were still being abused or had been injured and brought them to her park to heal and live as normal a life as possible. I could go on and on with heartbreaking stories about their broken hips/backs/feet and other abuses they've faced (such as becoming addicted to amphetamines they were forced to take to continue working instead of resting), but I know it's not the most uplifting thing to read. So now they roam around all day and get fed an bathed by volunteers. As a volunteer I can tell you it never got old feeding an elephant, or even jest seeing them walk past. Sure there were some less than pleasant tasks they asked of us, but even shit shoveling wasn't that bad. In fact I preferred it to working in the kitchen where you washed and chopped tons of pumpkins and melons for the elephants. They eat about 10% of their body weight each day, and there are 33 elephants weighing in at about 10,000 pounds each...that is a lot of food to prepare. They also eat a lot of sweet corn, so another task was to drive to the corn field and chop down stalks with machetes, bundle them up and carry them back to the truck. Mind you the weather in Thailand is hot, humid, and rainy right now, so the conditions could be cause for complaint, but I still had a lot of fun. In the afternoon there was an occasional job like cutting more corn, but they also prepared a lot of activities for us, such as a park tour where we met all 33 elephants and a number of heartbreaking documentaries to watch. One afternoon brought a Thai lesson. I found the culture fascinating but I failed miserably at the language. Their alphabet is made up of 44 characters, 30 some are vowel sounds, and there are five different tones. So one combination of letters could be five different words even though my silly American ear only hears one thing.
In addition to rescuing elephants, Lek has rescued about 300 dogs--most from the flood in Bangkok a couple years ago--that now live at the park. Most of them are across the street in a dog shelter, but about 50 lucky ones get to run around this side and do whatever they want. They are literally on the tables and some wait at your bedroom on case you are enough of a sucker to let them in at night. Despite the high likelihood that they have fleas, I fell prey to one sweet little dog that hopped onto my bed before I had the chance to kick her out.
The animals are great, but it's also the people I've spent this week with that have been wonderful! The staff are so warm and welcoming. They joke around with you like you are old friends. And it has been great getting to know all of the other volunteers, many of whom are also traveling for a long time and have made an important pit stop out of the elephant nature park.
So all of this (and the amazing food--it's like eating at Thai Basil every night!) has won me over and I hope to be able to spend a second week here before I head south to work on a farm. Let's just hope this trip to the Indian Embassy is quick and painless.
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