In the last blog entry we didn't write a lot of detail about what we actually saw at the Laos elephant festival, so I thought I would fill you all in now...

We arrived late afternoon on the Friday, to find what would normally be a quiet town buzzing with hundreds of Laotians who had all arrived on what looked like drag racers (a wooden cart with with the front two wheels about 2 metres in front, directed by long handle bars!). We were supprised to find that we were one of only a handfull of westerners, and all the others we saw were working for the festival. The evening was spent wandering around the main arena of the festival looking at various stalls, before we returned to the homestay to help cook our dinner.

The next day we go up early, hoping to visit the 75 elephants before they set off on their morning parade and see what sort of conditions they were being kept in. Unfortunately the road had been blocked off and we weren't allowed anywhere near them. We then watched the parade. Each elephant had a seat strapped to it, and a lot of them had been decorated with ribbons and colourful cloth, some had even been painted. Following them into the main arena they were lined up and made to lie down on command, and some of the babies were made to do tricks. To get them to lie down, the mahouts sitting on their heads either hit them with sharpened hooks or dug knives into the top of their heads.

After the parade the elephants were walked to another arena about 25 mins away where they demonstrated logging techniques, before giving people rides on their backs. There were about 60 elephants all walking about in a small space with the public wandering around their legs: it was an accident waiting to happen. We heard some rumbling from one of the elephants, indicating that it wasn't happy and then it threw it's mahout off onto the ground! It was quickly taken away from the main festival and round the corner out of sight. Our cameraman James managed to follow it and saw people beating it! After we had had some lunch, we returned to where the elephant had been taken top see what had happened. Pulling up about 300m away, a French lady came rushing over to tell us to get out of the area. We asked her what was happening to the elephant (she was working for an elephant care unit) but she didn't tell us. just got very angry and told us to go away! So we moved so we were just outside the fence but could still see the elephant chained up. After a while it turned out that the elephant had been given an overdose of tranquilizer, which explained why it was standing completely still with food hanging from it's mouth in the mid-day sun! We also found out that the elephant was on must (where males increase their testosterone levels, making them aggressive) and had been let into the parade anyway!! The French lady came back with some other people and had a discussion with Lek, and we were then told to jump in the van as the military had been called on us for tresspassing!

We made it back to our homestay, and left Laos the next morning, heading back to Chiang Mai. We had had an amazing experience, although very eye-opening as to how elephants are treated.