We booked a 2 day trip to Baan Chang Elephant Park. It was the most amazing 2 days ever. The whole thing was very nicely organised and we got to spend a lot of time up close with lots of elephants.
The park is one of the few around the area that is more elephant friendly and we were constantly assured by the guides that they loved their elephants very much and all the elephants at the park were rescued from bad people and disreputable parks where their elephants are over worked.
We learnt some elephant commands:
Na Long - sit down please
Bai - Go!
How - stop
Quay quay - go left or right, depending on which ear I am currently kicking
To be honest, I think the elephants weren't really listening to us, the mahouts were with us all the time and I think the elephants were just following them really. It reminded me a bit of when I was a kid and just started riding a horse. The horse just knew where to go and I wasn't in charge of it at all, even though I thought I was at the time.
It was particularly awesome to ride the elephant. We went out for an hour trek on the second day and the elephants were allowed to wander around freely while the guides and mahouts cooked us some chicken and noodles on a camp fire.
We also got to wash our elephants afterwards. We were given a bucket and a brush and got in the water with our elephant, it was really fun.
Elephants are amazing, they are stupidly massive. I knew that they were big, but once one is right in front of you, you realise just how massive they actually are. They're huge! They seemed really gentle to me, but you were always aware that if they wanted to they could squash you like a little bug. Luckily the mahouts were really good and didn't let them squash any of the frangi's.
They also gave us these funny clothes so that we all looked like little chairman mao's. I guess elephants like Mao :)
I'm so glad we did this, it was definitely a big highlight of our trip so far.
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