Chiang Mai – Baan Chang Elephant Park - 24th of March

We spent a day at Baan Chang Elephant Park, around an hour’s drive north of the city. The Park rescues elephants from Myanmar or from people using them for logging or not treating them well, and then brings them back to the park to live. Each elephant ‘chooses’ their own mahout who looks after them.

 Our course involved us trying out our hand at being a mahout for the day. This included getting to know them by feeding them bananas and sugar cane (huge bunches of bananas just swallowed in a few gulps!), learning the commands for go, stop, left, right, and down (in Burmese as the mahouts are from Myanmar), and going for a ride with them and then giving them a good bath in the pond.

 It was a great experience and we learned some interesting facts about elephants; they consume around 300kg of food each day and leave behind around 70kg! We were riding the elephants bareback, Kylie and I on one aptly named ‘Big Mamma.’ We took turns to sit on the elephant’s neck and act as mahout, and sit on the back as passenger. During the walk, Big Mamma frequently sprayed us with water through her trunk, cooling herself down and coating us (perhaps intentionally?) Turns out elephant skin is quite tough and the hair on their back and sides particularly bristly, so I was quite glad to climb down at the end. While it was great fun, sadly neither Kylie nor I would make a good mahout anytime soon!