Tuesday

We awoke very excited to be going to the elephant rescue reserve. We'd picked a one-day pass to experience being among them and learning about the sanctuary. The bus picked us up at half 8 and we joined others who were all from Canada being; Linda (a lady travelling alone), and a couple, Veronica and Brian. A thorough dvd was played explaining how the organisation had come about in rescuing elephants and also cats and dogs. Parts of it were really sad, and there was one story in particular of an elephant who had given birth to her baby but then the sack had rolled down a hill. The elephant was grieving from her loss and so was refusing to work for her owner. Her owner then would catapult stones at her eyes to try and force her to continue pulling logs and one day when she retaliated back, he stabbed her several times with his knife in one eye making her blind. It brought tears to all of our eyes and I was shocked to find out that having elephants street begging had only become illegal last December. After the dvd our tour guide (called Nick) also explained the cruelty of elephants being kept to ride on, which we knew about hence why we hadn't and wouldn't choose to do a tourist attraction which would harm them but wanted to help look after them. Nick said about the weight of the saddle around their necks and being kept chained up is the kind of place where they will try to rescue elephants from. The sad thing is that it is only when the elephant becomes of less use to its owner (so is older or they've eventually disabled it) that they can afford to buy them off the owner as the elephant is then of less interest to them, so almost all of the elephants they have have already gone through a lot of harm.

Arriving at the park there was tea, coffee and biscuits waiting, the facilities were good and Nick was an excellent tour guide. We began with greeting the elephants who each would have one mahout to look after the elephants needs. We could feed the adult ones watermelon and had tiny bananas for the baby elephant who was four years old and very mischievous! We each took it in turns to hand the fruit to the elephants trunk for them to then put into their mouths. The baby one was really cheeky and would keep collecting the bananas in his trunk until there were too many she'd drop them rather than just eating what she was given. She would then continue to sneak around the back of us looking in the bin and other bags for more bananas once they'd ran out.

Afterwards, we got ready to walk up the hills with the elephants, so layered up on suncream and we were given bottles of water and a bag of bananas each to occupy the elephants with. The baby elephant seemed to have a mind of its own and a bold personality bounding up past everyone and grabbing as many bananas off of us as it could. At one point the group got separated as one of the adult elephants decided to hoist down a tree splitting between us. Nick, Lisa and I were at the front and the rest of the group were wedged between the elephant who had chosen to take out the tree and the group of elephants behind them. Lauren said the baby elephant kept pushing into them to move forward and the big elephant in front obviously wasn't budging from eating at the big tree it had just pulled down so we waited for a bit and then the trainers got her moving again. Lunch was really nice, Lauren used a load of ingredients to make a salad for the group and there were lots of hot dishes, noodles and rice to choose from with Spring rolls and then melon and sticky coconut rice for desert. One of the dogs had been following us around the whole day who we named, 'Foxy' for his fox-like looks, and he joined us lying in shade whilst we ate.

After lunch we climbed down to a waterfall area where people were sliding down a crack in the rocks into a pool of water. This was supposed to be their version of a water slide, none of us girls fancied the jump so Nick gave it a go which I got on video. We then went and joined back with the elephants to bathe them in the water, it was pretty difficult to stand up in the river with all the rocks under our feet, but we were given buckets to all together throw the water over them. They seemed to enjoy this and afterwards we hosed ourselves down to go back to the main park area. Our guide took us through on a walk and the elephants were roaming free with water buffalo close by. It was a beautiful sight to see and it was great to walk with them in this kind of an environment, open fields and rivers around with hills and mountains in the distance. We met lots of other elephants, the youngest being a 4 month baby!

That evening, Lisa and Lauren took an evening to chill in whilst Nick and I went wandering around the night market and bought a few nice bits for the house. A long night of shopping after a big day with the elephants meant we had a good nights sleep.

Xxx