so i have returned to Chiang Mai to collect my extra clothes and stuff from the Tai Lai Hotel and will return tomorrow to the Elephant Nature Park. This place has been a total eyd and mind opener for me, even after a few days. We are about 59 volunteers that for for the last days from early morning to early night we are split up into work groups which do eveything from preparing the food for the elephants (cutting grass and corn stalks with machetes, mucking out elephants areas, bathing the elephants in the river with buckets and mostly happely splashing each other, scooping out their mud hole every day so they have fresh, not bacterial laden mud (what's tha all about! but it's fun and mud fights ensue). I am probably the oldest person partaking in this elephants melee and I'm thouroughly enjoying it. Our rooms are mostly wooden huts and have cold bucket showers, up on stilts since the elephants roam at will around the park (around 33 of them) as do an incredible amount of dogs which bark and howl at night and keep us all company in the day, jumping up on the tables and licking the leftovers. It's quite.... basic and wild and fun. We awake at 7 am, breakfsst until 7:39 and then it's off to do chores, divided into groups of ten or so.
this park is very different because there are no elephant rides or whatever and the only raison-d'etre of the park is to be a refugs and rescue for abused, old, sickly, traumatized elephants *you can see by some of the photos how crippled and old some of them are from abuse and malnurimente, to let them spend out their days in freedom and joy in an open and loving environment. This is the brainchild of a Thai woman named Lek (small in thai and she is SMALL but a barrel of energy and works among us and all of the thai workers constantly. I would like to start some kind of network for her on Netbook and will work on this when I return to civilsation. I am going to a more remote area, Surin, in southern eastern Thailand to work at a more hard core park which is less organized but you really get down and dirty with the elephants, over a hundred of them for a week of sleeping in huts on the ground and getting up at 6 and working all day to make shelters for them. A huge project, but more about that later. Hopefully I will have learned some real mahout skills, of positive feed back teaching, not the unbelievable cruel ways they have of training the young elephants which I will go into some other time, perhpas sending you a link of some filming. look for it. Then I will go to southern Thailand to some very remote islands and will keep you posted if possible.
much love to you al
giula