Elephant Nature Park is an elephant sanctuary for retired and rescued Thai elephants that have suffered some sort of abuse. One stepped on a land mine and was left for dead. Another elephant's mom was killed, and became a starving orphan before being brought to the park. A few of them were retired logging elephants who had oppressive masters. Cathy and I chose this place over other elephant sanctuaries after some research back in Jingzhou about ethical treatment of animals at tourist spots. If interested, here's a link (Elephant Nature Park).
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| Cathy and I with a senior. It had a pretty hard life before getting rescued. |
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| Elephants eat large portions of fruit. This guy was a bit greedy for food. Cathy had to constantly feed him. |
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| Another activity at ENP was elephant washing. |
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| Learning about the abuse some of these elephants went through was pretty saddening, but then one of them kisses you and puts a giant smile on your face. |
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| ...and a whole lot of thick, stinky slobber. I wonder if this guy didn't like my breath as much as I didn't like his. The story behind this guy is really sad. He was found traumatized by serving in some circus before getting purchased by ENP. I think he thought he was still in the circus performing tricks. |
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| Elephants like to put mud all over themselves. Not sure why...maybe for sunblock? |
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| A "family shot." They aren't really related because they come from various oppressive experiences, but elephants have different personalities, and make family groups regardless. We saw a male teenager getting blocked by his acting "grandma" because he wanted to get with a female elephant of a different "family." He tried to dart across the field to "get with her", but grannie stopped him. He's probably feeling REALLY oppressed now! |
We had a great time at Elephant Nature Park. There was no riding of elephants there, but I'm okay with that. The objective of the woman who set ENP was to allow people to see elephants in their most natural state, rather than being some sort of tourist ride.
Getting back to Chiang Mai around dinner, I brought Cathy to Burger King because she's never experienced that before. Needless to say, she enjoyed it quite a bit.
The next day, our flight to Phuket would leave late. We had one last full day in Chiang Mai. There were a number of options of what to do. We could have done zip-lining. However, Cathy was pretty scared of that, so we ruled it out. I could have taken a Muay Thai lesson, but Cathy would have been bored for 6 hours, so that one was tossed too. Instead, we treated ourselves to a really nice spa, then went to a part of city near the university that had interesting back lanes (called soi in Thai).
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| This is about as far as I'll go for having matching outfits with my gf. I know I'm Asian, but I'm still North American! |
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| In front of the spa. They had a pond as an entrance. |
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| I had Thai Burmese curry for lunch. |
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| Cathy exploring a Chinese art-deco store in a really fashionable soi. Notice the Chairman behind the left door. |
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| Cathy reading about Phuket in the Lonely Planet: Thailand in an outdoor cafe. |
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| My strawberry smoothie |
I have to say that this certainly won't be my last time in Chiang Mai...I absolutely loved it there. It's relaxing and full of adventure as well. Like everywhere I travel, there was not enough time to look around and do everything that I wanted to do. C'est la vie! Cathy and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and that's all that mattered.
On a final note, we were late getting back to the hotel to pick up our bags to get to the airport. We showed our tuk-tuk driver our flight tickets, and all he said was "there's not enough time!" He then went pedal to the metal on his vehicle and got us to the airport in 10 minutes. That was the most heart-thumping tuk-tuk ride we ever had. I seriously thought we were gonna tip over when he made turns, but he proved to be a good driver who knew the road.
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