Hello fellow drifters! We are fast approaching the end of our journey, and it’s kind of hard to believe. Luckily, we have a couple of our most anticipated places left to visit. Thailand and Japan. After the Tomb Raider-esk temples of Angkor Wat, it was an easy flight to hop on up to Thailand from Siem Reap. So, we decided to go to Phuket (against advice of many friends) for Trent’s birthday for some beach time.
To be honest, probably not the best decision. It was okay, but we wouldn’t return. Even though we stayed in the lesser party area of Karon Beach, it did not lack in the number of drunk slobs peppering the beach. Best way to describe Phuket… spring break in Cancun. Spring Breeeaaaak!!! Our only saving grace is that at the hotel we stayed in we had our own private pool, which we took full advantage of.
Beach and bars no thank you. Private pool and room service for Trent’s birthday? Yes please. Food poisoning for Trent on the last day? Well, happy birthday Trent. We can’t have it all… Flying sucks anyway, add a fever, chills, and crippling nausea and you have pressurized aluminum tube hurtling through the sky on its way to hell. Or Branson, Missouri, whichever is worse.
After Phuket, we hopped on another quick flight to bustling city of Bangkok. Here we explored markets, walked around the city, and generally just explored different areas. The highlight here was a biking and eating tour through Bang Krachao, an island oasis in the middle of the city. We toured around the forest island, local eating food and feeding pond fish. It was shocking to feel so isolated and peaceful just a short distance from the craziness that is Bangkok. But, it was perfect for us at this point, we may be a little saturated on the cool-but-not-culturally-interesting big cities.
As such, Bangkok was just okay for us. It’s another large city in southeast asia and we weren’t really in the mental space to party, which is apparently where the city really shines.
Next, we headed to Chiang Mai. Now this was a place we really enjoyed. It’s still a decent size city, but it has more of traditional cultural flare to it. The Old City in Chiang Mai is a large area surrounded by a moat with old fortress walls around its entirety.
Inside the walls contained lots of residences, shops, really really busy markets, places to eat, and temples. So many freaking temples everywhere! Side note: the outside walls of the city was the perfect place to enjoy long runs, albeit crazy hot ones! We definitely recommend Chiang Mai. As an added bonus we were there doing Songkran. Literally a week long water fight where no one is safe. Your on your motorcycle going to work? Sorry, here comes a bucket of water on your head. From Grannys to little kids, everyone was out in the street with super soakers, hoses, or just buckets of water. We got soaked and loved every second of it.
Pro tip: While you’re there, save your money, avoid the inflated tuk tuk prices and opt for the fun little red songtaew wagons!
Now. The real reason you came here… Elephants!
The Good
Elephant Nature Park (ENP) week Volunteer Program = best decision ever!
Worst decision ever? Not staying two weeks! Seriously, practically everyone we met did not want to leave. However, pricey plane tickets to Japan prevented any additional weeks tacked on.
ENP is a pretty amazing sanctuary. Essentially a huge open space in the mountains / jungle north of Chiang Mai where nearly 80 rescued elephants enjoy freedom following years of horrific abuse.
ENP not only houses rescued elephants, but it’s also home to 450 (and counting) rescue dogs and a countless amount of cats, all living the life they deserved from the beginning. Some of the older dogs are allowed to roam around the park and interact with you (and sometimes the elephants 🙂 ), which was awesome. A handful of the dogs were disabled, but had the most amazing spirits and spunk.
They are also many rescued water buffalo that roam the property and spend most of their time hot tubbing in the compost piles and the river that runs through the park.
The animals have round the clock veterinarian care and all dogs and cats have been spayed/neutered and vaccinated. They refuse to turn away any animal. There is one problem with taking in all these animals, however. Space. Space is limited. There are 5x more animals (dogs, cats) being brought in than being adopted out.
They are at capacity and still pushing harder everyday to build new enclosures, buy more land, hire more caretakers. Those needs require quite a bit of money, hence why we paid money to shovel poop. We knew what our money was going towards, and therefore it was a no brainer. If you are in the market for a wonderful new companion (or maybe just a place to donate some money to make a positive difference), check out the following information here.
So, let’s meet the woman behind this incredible place, Lek Chailert. Lek grew up in Thailand and was a young girl when she first witnessed the abuse of an elephant near her home. Even being the country’ national symbol, elephant abuse was widely accepted among the people at the time and sadly still is tolerated too much. The elephant’s screams stuck with her, and she said that she simply could not ignore the abuse. She has done so much to help, it’s pretty amazing.
From that moment on she has not stopped advocating for the wellbeing and freedom of elephants, and all animals alike. She founded the Save the Elephant Foundation, and started numerous projects throughout SE Asia and the world, encouraging everyone to join her in the fight. She’s received lots of international recognition, including being invited to the White House in 2010 by Hillary Clinton to be honored as one of six Women Heroes of Global Conservation. Standing under five feet, she is a force, a champion, and without a doubt, a absolute superhero. She has had her life threatened, been shot at, and been put in prison numerous times by those who stand to lose the most from the ethical treatment of the elephants. Nothing has slowed her down. Being in her presence evokes lots of emotions, hence Michele’s swollen eyes in this photo.
Back to the park, at ENP, We had a private room (equipped with a mosquito net). At night the sounds of soft elephant trumpets lulled us to sleep. There was something awesome about laying in bed and hearing the calls of all the animals at night. We were fed breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, buffet style (cue Trent’s happy dance), and had plenty of time to relax by the river, watching the elephants bathe themselves and occasionally sneak their trunk past the fence to snatch bananas.
We worked roughly 4 hours each day, and our work included shoveling poop (it literally has zero smell), offloading trucks of watermelons and bananas, clearing the park property of uneaten food scraps, and cleaning out the elephant food sinks.
Michele has the unfortunate and fortunate incident of being knocked in the face by a flying watermelon when she didn’t turn fast enough in time to catch the next one. Unfortunate because it hurt. Bad. Fortunate because she swears it corrected her crooked bridge. See? All misfortunes have a silver lining! She’s now also faster in her reflexes out of sheer necessity. Win win!
Even though this part of our trip was all about the animals, we were lucky enough to meet some great people who will hopefully be friends for a long time.
Sitting around after our work day enjoying beers, learning about different homes, and talking about the elephants will always be a treasured memory.
The Bad
One day our “job” was to walk around the park while the guides introduced us to elephants and gave us their back stories and fed them bananas.
Not really work, but we’ll take it. The stories ranged from horrific to devastating. The one aspect of their life that all elephants shared was their initial story. Michele has been an elephant advocate for years and prior to coming to ENP she knew about the phajaan. Trent had only heard kind of second hand stories and, to be honest, generally avoids those kind of “sad” animal stories. It seemed so barbaric and evil that surely it wasn’t still happening, was it? We can assure you that it is.
ENP is surrounded by elephant trekking camps that rely solely on tourists to come and mount the elephants. On one side of the park you can see hoards of tourists coming each day to ride these elephants. Hour after hour these giants cart tourists up and down hills for 10 or more hours. It was heartbreaking to see them constantly at work across the river from the park.
The one thing we hope everybody we know and care about understands after this is that ANY elephant that you see being used for entertainment (like the circus or giving rides to people) has had unspeakable and horrible things done to them to get them to obey. It’s not like training a dog to sit or lovingly teaching your child to read. What happens is a crime against nature, and we plead with everybody who reads to never go the circus, ride an elephant, or give any money to support this. If you’ve recently bought tickets to do something, just message us and we’ll repay you for your lost expense as well as help find something else that will be more fun anyway, we promise we’re good at this kind of research :). So why are we so passionate about this? Well, here it comes…
The Ugly (The Phajaan)
What is phajaan you ask? Its translation: the crush… The worst torture of an elephant that you can think of, is happening to them non-stop. The people responsible for phajaan, known as mahouts, believe this treatment will literally “crush” their soul, in order to make them easy to control. Why would they do that? So that we (tourists) can ride them, watch them paint stupid pictures for us, perform ridiculous stunts in circuses, and other forms of “entertainment.”
Until people stop making money from this unforgivable practice, it seems unlikely to stop. Elephants are dragged (with ropes) away from their families when they are young and easier to control. Elephants are highly sentient beings and one of the most family oriented species alive. Taking the baby away is absolutely devastating to the mother. They are tied up for weeks and are repeatedly beaten and stabbed with metal hooks, starved, legs stretched, their ears are literally torn, they are screamed at, kicked, and other forms of physical and mental torture. This continues non-stop until the mahout feels the soul is “crushed” enough for training. It’s such an awful experience, the mahouts have to stay up all night with the baby elephants and make sure they do not step on their own trunks to commit suicide. Think about that, elephants literally commit suicide to stop the phajaan.
After this torture the elephants live a life of non-stop labor and servitude without the things they crave most in the world, community, family, and freedom. Baby elephants even stand in the streets of Bangkok (and other cities) with their mahout, but otherwise completely alone, all day long begging for food. The bleeding-heart tourists see the skinny and frightened baby elephants and give them food. In order to give them food however, they need to pay money. It’s a win-win for the mahout, they are getting paid to have their elephant fed. We know its difficult if you experience this begging, but giving money to feed the elephant only results in more baby elephants being stolen from their families to do the same thing. Please never ever give money to anyone involved in this awful practice.
Depending on an elephant’s size, they eat roughly 200 – 600 pounds of food everyday and one thing that captives elephants aren’t given is time to eat. The elephants become underweight, sluggish and therefore underperform. When the elephants are not performing they are severely punished often times with repeated stabbing with the hook in an infected hole in the ear or head of the elephant. Elephants have very sensitive skin and ears, filled with more nerve endings than a human’s. They feel pain more acutely than even we do. How terrible that as a human species, we can ever think this is okay?
Of the elephants at the park, there were several of them with bandaged feet from stepping on landmines during illegal logging. Their feet were ripped in half and need daily treatment to heal. Here’s the thing with elephants, they don’t necessarily lie around all day.
They are mostly on their feet, making any type of healing last much longer. Many of these elephants will be healing their whole life, but that is only from the physical trauma. There are elephants with amputated ears because they became so infected from rips and holes. There are elephants who can’t move because of broken hips and legs from forced breeding, where an elephant’s legs are tied up and a bull in heat is released upon them.
This happens every month until it can be determined a female is pregnant. Rape is rape, even in elephant culture and leaves a tremendous emotional scar on the female elephant. You can see it in their eyes, you can see it in the way they move. It’s a full-throttle punch to the gut to see the physical and emotional scars these magnificent animals have endured.
The hardest moment was during our trip back to Chiang Mai at the end of the week, where we passed a trekking camp, which is a camp where elephants are used for riding and entertainment. An elephant was being led by her mahout down a road and she was not stopping fast enough and the mahout repeatedly stabbed his bull hook between her eyes. The hook stuck into the elephant’s skin like it was clay. We left feeling so fulfilled only to be reminded that thousands of elephants all over Asia are still enduring this treatment.
Reading this is not easy, we know. Seeing it is much worse.
Our mission going forward is to spread the word about the truth behind elephant entertainment. There are still millions of people riding elephants all over the world (primarily in southeast asia) each year. We urge you to look at all forms of animals entertainment with a skeptical curiosity. What’s behind the scenes? Is this normal for an animal to do? Does this animal even want to be doing this?
For a more detailed account, please check out one of these amazing documentaries: Love and Bananas An Apology to Elephants The Ivory Game Tyke Elephant Outlaw. We implore you to become a champion for elephants now!
We apologize this wasn’t the lighthearted musings that we typically deliver but we felt it was imperative. Please share with people you know. Education is where change happens.
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I cried and cried and cried!