Category: Elephants

At the Elephant Nature Park, about one hour north of Chiang Mai, longer-term volunteers begin each Monday. We were picked up at 8:15am by a van from our condo and after a brief stop at the office to pay our balance and pick up our volunteer T-shirts and water bottles, we were on our way […]

Tuesday, our first full day at the park began at around 4am with a chorus of barking dogs. We tried our best to get back to sleep, but inevitably, something would rile the dogs each hour. We were both awake long before our alarm was scheduled to go off. We enjoyed a small buffet breakfast […]

Wednesday morning began in the usual way – dogs barking, breakfast with elephants walking mere meters from where we were sitting and getting our chore assignments for the day. Today was corn harvesting day which meant that we wore long-sleeved clothing (to avoid itching) and long pants or boots for the same reason. Mindy also […]

We began our day knowing it would end at Elephant Haven, a place where elephants can roam free, even during the night. Team Poop went to work as several elephants enjoyed the corn we had just cut the day before: After showering (something we got into a routine of doing approximately 3 times a day), […]

Friday morning began early with breakfast at Elephant Haven before heading down the mountain again. One of the projects Lek has spearheaded is tying blessed monk cloth around trees to help prevent deforestation. In Thai culture if someone cuts down a tree that has an orange cloth tied around it, they will receive bad luck […]

Despite the lack of photographical evidence (due to a corrupt memory card) our Saturday morning was spent washing and sorting elephant food including squash and watermelons. Having finished early we reunited Team Poop to get the shit done! (tee hee hee) Before lunch Mindy witnessed what we now refer to as The Elephant Kerfuffle: Relaxing […]

Our last day began with one last Team Poop adventure! Here we are working together to get an entire pile of elephant poo onto the tractor: Again, we had members of the peanut gallery supervising our work: Mindy and Ligeia decided to spend their last hours with their favorite elephants. We fed Dani, pet her […]