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Published: June 22nd 2017
Geo: 19.8841, 102.142
Susie's week
Elephant Nature Park is an elephant rescue and rehabilitation centre in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Their sole aim is to provide a better life for elephants that have suffered under the hand of humans that use elephants as slaves in the logging industry, entertainment in circuses, transport and entertainment in the tourism industry and for begging in the streets.
As a part of the volunteering week the park showed us some videos that truely represent what these poor animals go through. To put it lightly, babies are taken from their mothers at a very young age, tied into a cage and tortured for 4 to 7 days, even more depending on how compliant they are. The reason for this is so that they literally beat the spirit out of them. What is left is an exhausted, confused, terrified elephant with no fight left in them. Then they are sold to the various industries to be taught tricks for entertainment in circuses and festivals, used to haul trees up and down mountains until they collapse, used to transport tourists around where the seat will be cutting their skin and they will get fungal infections from the tourists feet on their (very sensitive) skin and they will be paraded around the streets where they will beg tourists to pay so that they can be fed a bottle of milk.
Elephant Nature Park have rescued around 100 elephants since establishing in the 90's. One woman's (Lek Chailert) mission has become the life line for so many elephants because she was determined to push the boundaries and change the way elephants are treated in south east asia.
My week at Elephant Nature Park was most definitely one of the best weeks of my life so far. I volunteered to work with the veterinary team as I was massively curious to see how these animals were treated medically.
Every morning we would meet and begin our day with cleaning and treating a couple of elephants that had trodden on land mines. These wounds would need cleaning and treating twice a day so we would feed them a basket of watermelon and go about our business! Each elephant has a 'mahout'. These men stay with the elephants all day. They care for them, keep an eye on them and are paired until one or the other dies. These mahouts are also the same mahouts that were
treating them badly in the first place! Elephant Nature Park rescue the elephants but they also bring the mahouts, re-educate them, provide them with a salary and provide their families with jobs and education so that they can slowly eradicate this cruelty by removing the problem.
Job number two was to clean a facial abcess on one of the old ladies, Mae Jan Peng. One of us would feed her elephant grain while the others would clean and flush her abcess. Mae Jan Peng has a flower in her ear because there is a large hole in her ear and her mahout thought the flower would be more pretty. Awwwww!
The third job for the day is to smoosh up loads and loads of bananas to mix with elephant grain that we would put vitamin C tablets in for the babies and vitamin B tablets in for the oldies. Then we drive around the park giving the vitamins (definitely a highlight of the day). One of the babies called 'Navaan' is on the verge of being a naughty little boy to a naughty, dangerous bull so when he came running after us to eat all of our banana mush, we would high
tail it out of their! On a couple of occassions he managed to steal our banana mush. But it's ok because he's such a cute little 1 ton baby boy, we forgive him.
After this, we chop up A LOT of watermelon for the third patient of the day, Thai Koon. Thai koon is also a land mine victim, how ever her wound is deeper and she really really enjoys playing in the mud! So this lady gets a bandage every day. The further on we got into the week, my creativity got the better of me and her bandage became more and more extravagant! Her mahout shook his head every day she had a new design but he loved it really! She would always go back to her herd and parade around showing off her beautiful bandage before she threw herself in the mud (is what i kept telling myself!). The way that we did this was that the elephant would be trained to either sit in a certain way or lift their foot up for us in return for being fed watermelon, bananas and sometimes squash.
Once Thai Koon has gone off strutting her stuff, it's time for lunch. Lunch
was served buffet style at ENP. Anyone who knows me knows that this is not good. Susie cannot control herself around food. My face became more red with the carbs every single day! It was also completely vegetarian! I now consider myself an expert in the different ways tofu can disguise itself to fool you into thinking you are about to eat meat. The food was plentiful, and nice. The salad was delicious and it was different every day.
The afternoon began with treating some of the horses hooves. The least favourite time of the day because the horses wanted to kill us. They were very naughty, not letting us pick put the hooves, kicking, nibbling... nope. Didn't get on with the horses. They had the same treatment as Thai Koon with the cleaning, treating and bandaging but they didn't get the posh bandages. They'd probably kick it off and stamp on it while pretending it was me if I tried to do a pretty one for them. That's how they were.
Next job was to remove Thai Koon's bandage and give it another little clean and treatment, then we would return to the original two elephants to clean and treat
before they got tucked back into bed, and then we would treat Navaan's mums foot while we play with Navaan! And also clean and treat an elephants wound where there used to be an ear. It was infected and became necrotic so it ended up coming off unfortunately.
That concluded our working day. In addition to this routine, we would observe and 'help' the team with an ill elephant (called Bai Cha) who, a couple of days before I arrived became ill with colic or impaction. Basically the elephants food has gotten stuck in the digestive system. This causes massive bloat and could lead to toxicity and death. The vets were treating her with regular fluids to keep her hydrated, medication to dilate the digestive system and enemas to try to flush out the impaction. Her poor tum grew bigger and bigger as the days went by and there was no sign of her getting any better, however she didn't take a big turn for the worse either so the vets were confused but optimistic! But then on my last day, she went to the toilet a little bit and she ate a small amount and her stomach seemed to have
reduced in size which was fantastic news. I've kept in contact with some of the girls who stayed longer and they've told me she's made a full recovery which is great! It was so interesting watching the veterinary treatment and really satisfying to know that it worked!
If you ever go to Chiang Mai, please sign up to volunteer at Elephant Nature Park. The non-veterinary volunteering consists of poop scooping, preparing the food and feeding the elephants, cutting corn and bathing the elephants. I made a load of friends who did this volunteering and they had an amazing week too! Please check out the website www.elephantnaturepark.org if you want any info. They have profiles up of all the elephants too so you can see where they have been rescued from and how old they are etc. Also follow lek chailert on facebook. She is an amazing person and puts up loads of videos and pictures of the elephants playing and talking to each other. It's gorgeous!
Phil's week
So, as I waved Susie off on her bus to Chiang Mai I realised that for the first time in 10 weeks I was going to have to try and remember how to make a decision by myself. An hour and a half later I managed to get myself some beef noodle soup for dinner. So the next day was going to be a 20 hour bus ride over the border into Laos and on to Luang Prabang. I had read it's best to bring your own food on the bus as there wasn't much on offer at the stops the bus would make. So after some confusion about a special offer in the local Tesco express I left with 3 family sharing bags of crisps and an assortment of other snacks to keep me going.
So the bus journey was largely uneventful until we crossed the border. So, it became apparent that northern Laos is pretty much one big mountain range and the roads are draped over these mountains with no real barriers to stop you careering over thy
e edge to a prolonged traumatic death. However it was actually grand...the roads were so steep the bus couldn't go fast going up the mountain sides and the massive potholes meant he had to go slow to avoid leaving the gearbox on the road going down the other side. Happy days.
I finally arrived
in Luang Prabang and dropped my stuff off in the hostel and went looking for breakfast, happily everyone has noodle soup for breakfast so there was a few places to get some bloody lovely fresh and warming noodle soup. I had a stroll about the local fresh food market, it was....interesting. There were butchers, fruit and veg sellers, bbq stalls, soup stalls all sorts... A few places were selling live toads with their legs tied up to stop them jumping away, rats, beetles, what looked like magpies, snakes all for eating. Pretty different.
The following day, I had signed up for a trip to a local waterfall, I had heard it was a good one to see but I wasn't expecting what was one of the most spectacular sights of the trip so far. The water was turquoise from the calcium in the limestone. Myself and a pair of Cork lads I met at my hostel climbed to the top of the falls...there's a well beaten track but was pretty steep. We got in for a swim at the top to cool off, the view over the top of the falls was amazing...must have been 300 + feet to the bottom.
We mostly slid back down to the bottom and walked to the local village where we we're getting picked up. We were loaded up into the minibus when the driver realised we had a puncture...off we all got. Myself and an Aussie bloke thought it would be a good idea at this stage to get a beer and tell the driver how to properly change a tyre.
That night went for a few beers with the Irish lads and a few Germans. Pubs close pretty early here, so everyone goes bowling after the pub....so we decided to pick up a £2 bottle of vodka on the way to the bowling alley...how we didn't get thrown out I don't know, there were some shennanigans. It was a lot of fun.
I decided to go to Phonsavan, a nine hour bus ride away. There is a place called the plain of jars where there are ancient stone pots just sitting in some fields, they're basically a mystery. However I wasn't too fussed about them, Phonsavan was one of the most bombed places during the Vietnam war and I was more interested in that really. I arrived and it was fecking freezing, which I wasn't
expecting. The place I was staying has no heating, wasn't pleasant. anyway I ended booking onto a tour to see the plain of jars, an old Russian tank which had been abandoned in the countryside, and also a whiskey factory where you can try a variety of whiskies. I would have hired a scooter and done this myself but it was forecast for lots of rain. There is Evidence of bombing everywhere in Phonsavan, there are old bombs stood upright outside shops and restaurants, the countryside is littered with bomb craters and you also see different agencies clearing the countryside of UXO or unexploded ordanance. As it turned out the tour was a hatchet job. The guide wasn't a guide he was a driver who didn't speak English, the Russian tank was unrecognisable as a tank, it was a metal box, the whiskey factory was a shed in somebodys yard where the were making moonshine. You could try it if you didn't mind sharing the minging shot glass with everyone else who has ever visited there. At least it warmed me up a bit. However, I did manage to find a restaurant with a big open wood fire which I
nestled in beside for most of the evening. Back to Luang Prabang the following morning where Sooz was on her way to and we would meet up again to continue our journey.
The Rest of Laos
Sooz arrived at 6am and Phil came to meet her. After a greeting of a little shake of the hand and a smack on the bum we were away to check in and chill out for a bit before we headed back to the waterfalls that Phil had previously been to. They were stunning. There's also a small bear sanctuary there where they rescue bears from bile farms. Those bears love a hammock! We moved on from Luang Prabang to get a bus to Xam Nua. Now this journey... lets just say it all began with us going to the wrong bus stop. On completely the wrong end of town. We should have known. We should have given up. We got a tuktuk to the other bus stop. The bus was a minibus. We should have given up. We got on (folded into) the bus. During the course of the journey they kept letting more people (and their suspect looking/ smelling luggage) on the bus. The 15 seater minibus became a 23 person sardine tin. 13 hours later we arrived in Xam Nua. This was the first time we had not booked accommodation. "It's fine" we said. "It's a little town with a lot of accommodation, we'll find something no problem". No one told us that the president was in town holding a big old conference meeting and EVERYWHERE was booked out. After wandering for 2 hours getting rejected by every hotel, some military men took pity on us and drove us to the one place that had a room. A 2.5 out of 10 rated hotel that was literally at the bus station where we got off the bus in the first place. We didn't care at this stage, we needed to sleep.
After the ordeal from the previous night we slept in a realised that we missed the bus to go to Vieng Xai. We ploughed on through and rented a scooter to get us there, and we are so glad we did! The scenery was breath-taking! We did a tour of the caves of Vieng Xai where a population of 20,000 people hid during the war and marvelled at the beautiful town of Vieng Xai. Hallelujah! It was worth the journey!
We then got another bus (slightly bigger this time) to Hanoi, Vietnam which was another 'experience', but we arrived safe and sound and thankful that Vietnam is known for a good train service!
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Christopher Carroll
non-member comment
Wow what a couple of great blogs. I think you will need a holiday when you get back to get over all this!