LONG AWAITED ELEPHANT CAMP

We went to the Maetaman Elephant Camp which was about an hour and a half ride from the city of Chiang Mai. They gave us a discount for our project and were actually very interested in learning more. 

The day started with a demonstration of the elephants bathing in the river with their "mahout." Each elephant that lives at the camp has two mahouts so that they can have days off. Traditionally the mahout and the elephant would be partners for the elephants entire life.

The elephant show....

Riding an elephant. We sat on top of a platform on the elephant. I road with our friend Keung who uses a wheel chair. She has a spinal cord injury and is not able to use her legs. The staff helped her transfer in an out of the platform and was very accommodating on our visit. I was very surprised at how much the elephant rocks while it walks. Keung and I almost slipped out of the seating area a couple of times.

Feeding the elephant bananas and sugar cane. We were told that an elephant eats about 10% of its body weight a day.

We walked along the road and then cut into the fields. This was the view while we stopped to give our elephant a snack.

We had a little down time before our next activity after lunch so our hostess for the day showed off one of the ways the camp "recycles."

According to her, elephant dung has a lot of grass left into which they use as the fibers in the paper. The soak the dung for a while, drain it, boil it and then make paper. It was available for sale at the gift shop and she gave us eat a book mark to take home.

The last activity of the day we chose to participate in was a bamboo ride down the river. The river was very calm but peaceful. They loaned us these lovely hats in case it started to rain too hard.