We woke up bright and early at 6am (it was still dark outside) to get ready for a full day with elephants! :)
There are a lot of elephant tours in Chiang Mai but the one we chose is supposed to treat the elephants well and eventually set them free in the wild. We arrived at the farm and were paired up with an elephant and their trainer based on our personalities. Apparently I'm similar to an old pregnant elephant -__-
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| Norm loves poop |
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| Baby elephant wanted to play.... |
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| Scratching itself |
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| Candid "Ew" |
The elephants eat so much! They only sleep 4 hours a day and for the rest of the day they just eat. They have really good memory too so they actually recognize their trainers and even the guests. We were introduced to our elephants by feeding them non stop for 5 minutes. JA! (Hi) followed by Bon! (Open mouth) then fed it bananas and sugarcane. The elephants mouths are super strong. We could hear the thick sugar cane breaking in their mouths. After our intro we had to quickly clean the elephants so we could ride them. We also had to check their poop to make sure they were healthy by picking up the poop with our bare hands and squeezing out the liquid 0__0 I couldn't even wash my hands right after...
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| They eat so much! |
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| Healthy poop check |
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| It didn't smell as bad as I thought |
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| I had to do it too... |
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| Taking my elephant for a walk |
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| Shower time! |
There are three ways to mount an elephant. Lucky for me, my elephant was pregnant and I had to grab the rope and jump as high as I could onto its neck. (I didn't realize I could jump so high!) The elephant ride was fun but I didn't realize it would be 1.5 hours. My boney butt was definitely not prepared (it is now bruised). Oh also lucky for me my elephant had a skin problem and it kept spitting at me but by then I was covered in dirt so it was all good.
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| JUMP! |
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| Normal way to mount an elephant |
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| Elephant ride |
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| Hi! |
After the scenic ride we finally got to eat lunch. (Riding an elephant is surprisingly exhausting) The food was a nice spread of savory and sweet Thai food with some fruit. Soon after it was time to bathe the elephants! We got soaked but it was a lot of fun :) We also trekked to the nearby waterfall where norm decided to piggy back me and we slipped and fell. Now I have a big bruise on my knee. At least we got a good picture out of it!
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| Our spread |
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| Shower round 2 |
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| Water fight! |
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| =) |
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| The water was so cold |
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| It appears Norm is leading me to safety but instead I cut and bruised my knee =( |
We changed out of our wet clothes and it was time to say goodbye to our elephants. All in all it was a really fun experience and we learned a lot about elephants. They also have a photographer follow us to take pictures and videos. They gave each of us a DVD but we didn't get a chance to see the pictures yet. Hopefully there are some good ones!
By the time we got back to our hotel it was dinner time so we went to the nearby night market to grab some food and got another Thai massage. I can definitely live like this :)
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| Gyozas |
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| Norm loves night markets |
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| Noodles galore |
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| Soup noodles |
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