Elle's Travels

After spending a few hours bouncing around in the back of a minibus I finally arrived at the Bann Chang Elephant Park, near Chang Mai in northern Thailand. The shaky journey was worth it though as I scrambled out the back and found my footing, glancing up to suddenly find myself in the middle of a lush green jungle surrounded by 50 Asian elephants milling around a clearing in the trees. I was taken into a little dirty wooden hut to meet the rest of my group, a Chinese mother and her two teenage daughters, a lovely middle-aged Australian couple, and our Thai group leader named Woody, after the woodpecker. After donning some rather unattractive blue scrubs we grabbed some big wicker baskets full of bunches of bananas and carried them over to the elephants waiting to be fed. To feed them you picked up a bunch of slightly rotting and ant-ridden bananas and held it up to an elephant’s trunk for it to grab itself and pop the entire thing into its mouth, peel, ants and all.

The difference between the elephants at Bann Chang and all others elephants I’d seen so far on my trip in Thailand was remarkable. The elephants here seemed a lot happier and healthier and each had their own Burmese mahout to personally care for them. You could tell that this elephant park wasn’t a tourist trap in a bid for money. Elephants here didn’t have baskets strapped to their backs digging into their skin and putting pressure on their spines. Tourists rode the elephants bareback, and for no more than one hour every other day. Mothers and babies were kept together at all costs, and mahouts also cared for a number of blind elephants whom weren’t able to be ridden and wouldn’t survive in the wild.

The most extraordinary moment of my day at the park was having the chance to help feed an elderly bind female elephant. Her age and disability made her slow, untrusting, and wary of new visitors with strange scents. She has mottled skin around her forehead and held her head low to the ground, unable to see the stunning environment surrounding her. I edged towards her slowly, allowing her time to become comfortable with my presence. With one hand I picked up the least rotten bunch of bananas I could find, and with the other I gently stroked her trunk before guiding it towards the bananas and helping her to wrap her trunk around them and feed herself. At the time, and still now, the moment feels surreal, a once in a lifetime moment between myself and the elephant that will never be repeated.