Pachyderm Playtime

No trip to Chiang Mai would be complete without spending at least a day with Asia's largest mammal.

The hills around Chiang Mai are full to bursting with a wide range of elephant parks, sanctuaries and trekking agencies. As ever with Asia, animal welfare is rarely top priority and it's worth doing a bit of homework to make sure you are supporting a place that properly looks after the elephants.

We settled on the Elephant Nature Park which is home to 38 rescued and rehabilitated elephants - mostly former work elephants that sustained serious injury or elephants that were orphaned at a  young age.

The Asian elephant is endangered with only 25,000-33,000 elephants left in the wild.  Their once vast habitat covers a huge area expanding from India and Nepal in the west; east to Vietnam and south to Malaysia and Indonesia.

 Much smaller than their African cousins, the Asian elephant still weighs in at about 11,000 pounds when fully grown. Despite their massive size, these animals are truly gentle giants - even the most wary visitors are boldly feeding, petting and even bathing with the elephants in no time.

The park is in a lovely setting, surrounded by hills, lush jungle and a shallow stream - which is essential for elephant bath time! The park gets busy, but they have pretty effective crowd control by limiting numbers and by breaking visitors up into small groups.

The park allows you to spend a lot of time with the elephants - and a lot of that time is spent feeding.  These massive vegetarians eat for 16-18 hours a day and take in well over 300 pounds of fruit, vegetables and grass each day.

Bath time is of course of the highlight.  These elephants bathe everyday to rinse off and cool down, but no sooner are they clean than they go and roll around in the very mud they just rinsed off.  The sun is strong in this part of the world and a good coat of mud and dirt makes for a pretty effective natural sunscreen.

On the whole it's an incredible experience (if a bit pricey - even by western standards at around $75.00 a head) but it's all for a good cause and a great way to support a local business.  Just be prepared to get a bit dirty and maybe even get covered in a bit of elephant snot.

For those of you accessing this from the Register Mail, you can view the rest of my photos from the Elephant Nature Park and read the full blog at www.wherecanigetadrink.blogspot.com.