Today was billed as one of the highlights of this trip and so it turned out. We visited one of the 100s of Elephant Sanctuaries in the Chiang Mai area and really did not know what to expect. At a roadside cafe overlooking a vibrant fruit and veg garden we met our host Dom and after a short wait and coffee we got started with a ride of 10-15 minutes on a bamboo raft which took us to the Elephant Sanctuary. Later in the day we would discover that these rafts are a popular afternoon entertainment with the local young set, and by the time we finished our elephant visit, many groups of locals were riding rafts and stopping for beer and food at one of the many riverside impromptu cafes.

However, back to the elephants. The sanctuary we visited has 4 elephants, but one is at the local vet hospital with a stomach infection so we only met 3 of them. there names are Mamacita, Bon Jovi, and Lady Gaga. The last two are sisters.

As you can see from the photos below we were the only guests at the Sanctuary so we got to spend some quality time with the three animals. A typical adult elephant eats between 150-170kg of vegetation per day and as a consequence eating is pretty much a non-stop activity and they are quite insistent about it.

They get to play in the water a couple of times per day. It is a good cool-down for them as at this time of the year mid day temperatures are 35-38 C°. It also washes off the dirt they throw over themselves as sun and insect protection.

Each elephant has a handler called a Mahout. In the case of these elephants, they are young men from a "hill tribe" whose families have been elephant handlers for generations. But with the decline of elephants in the wild and the decline of using elephants as working animals such people now work for organizations that combine elephant protection and tourism.

The Mahouts seemed to enjoy getting the elephants to spray us with water. By the time their swim was over I was as wet as they were.

Our final chore was the preparation of a dietary supplement. The ingrediants are shown in the photos immediately above. The black stuff is raw tamarind, and the other ingredients are rice, tumeric, ginger, galangal, bananas, salt and lemongrass. These ingredients are cut up, ground into a paste and formed into tennis ball sized "pills". The animals seemed to like it, that is what Nina is feeding them in the last 2 photos immediately above.

A fun day. But also a bit sobering or thought provoking. Are we, as tourists, helping these people or harming them in the long term?