Indochina Express - Day 18 (Chiang Mai)

March 20

Today, we are driving about 1.5 hrs north of Chiang Mai to the Highlands Elephant Center. This trip caused some issues in our trip planning. We really wanted an experience with Asian elephants in Thailand, but the first option that the travel agents suggested included being able to ride on an elephant, and there were indications in reviews on travel sites that the elephants were chained at night. This was not at all what we had in mind, so we were happy when beth found the Elephant Nature Park. This park was founded in 2005 by Sangduen "Lek" Chailert, probably the world's foremost spokesperson for the humane treatment of elephants.

Lek grew up in the mountains of northern Thailand near the Myanmar border. As a child, she saw the mistreatment of Asian elephants involved in logging teak and started providing medical care to elephants as a teenager. Thailand banned teak logging in 1989 and most of the captive elephants were moved into tourism - performing at shows, allowing people to ride them or acting as pack animals to trekkers. Injury, as well as death, of these elephants are common, so captive breeding programs were part of these businesses. Lek knew that in order to make the elephants docile enough to safely interact with people, they had to be mentally broken so when she was able, she started to rescue animals and provide them with a sanctuary where they can live out their lives in dignity. As tourism crashed during the COVID pandemic, she encouraged many of the tourism companies to either give up their elephants or to convert to a business model where tourists come to care for the elephants instead of coming for a show. For her work, Lek was recognized by then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton as one of six Global Conservation Female Heroes and awarded the Legion of Honour by French President Emmanuel Macron. She has also appeared in documentaries produced by National Geographic, BBC, Animal Planet and Discovery. 

Lek has now rescued more than 200 elephants, and the original Elephant Nature Park is running out of space. The Highlands Elephant Center, where we are going, is a spin-off from the Elephant Nature Park that opened in 2013. They currently have six elephants: five females and one male and they only take small groups. After an "interesting" ride into the mountains along increasingly sketchy roads, we pass cages with monkeys, geese and pigs before arriving at a wooden hut where we meet our guide for the day, Bobby, and two other guests: a day trader who is from Wales, but it currently living in southern Thailand and a woman from Czechia. Bobby explains to us that we will prepare breakfast for two of the elephants and shows us two large containers of mini watermelons and a half-dozen small machetes. Our first job is to quarter all of the watermelons. When we are done, Bobby tells us that the elephants are on their way. Here is what we saw:

The men walking with the elephants are mahouts. They are trainers, keepers, bodyguards and friends to specific elephants and these deep connections are critical on keeping both the elephants and general public safe. Breakfast is popular and these elephants can move surprisingly quickly given that they weigh about 2.5 tons each!

Now it is clear what the structure that we are standing in is for. The guests (and the watermelons) are in the inside and the elephants stand on the outside, putting their trunks inside. Elephant trunks are quite amazing - equal parts snorkel, periscope, drinking straw, nose, and arm & hand. We nervously hold out the first pieces of watermelon and an elephant reaches out, wraps their trunk around the watermelon and plops it into their mouth. The trunk is quite warm to the touch and, given its various uses, also dirty and slimy. These two ladies are hungry (Bobby tells us that each of them eats in excess of 300 lbs of food per day) and are not shy about whacking us with their trunks if we are not bringing watermelons fast enough. In no time, both containers are empty, and the elephants are still reaching around with their trunks to see if there are more watermelons hidden away somewhere. Here is a picture:

Bobby tells us that these two elephants: Mae Pond (born in 1981) closest to us in the picture and Nong Pop (born in 1990) are two of the five female elephants at this site. The matriarch of the family, Kham Paeng (born in 1971) is in an enclosure with a new female Moh Go Nar who arrived in July 2024 and her just over1 year old calf Jun. There is also a young male named Kham Saen (born in 2019), but in the last year he has, like many adolescents, been acting out and not paying attention to his mahout. As a result, he is no longer safe to be with people and is kept in a separate enclosure.

Breakfast over, we walk down the road with Mae Pond and Nong Pop toward the main enclosure. But elephants don't go anywhere without a food source nearby, so we are each given a string bag of pretty overripe (to us) bananas. Bobby tells us to wear the bag on our outside shoulder because the elephants will otherwise just reach into the bag and help themselves. This is obviously a favorite snack because Mae Pond and Nong Pop eat the bananas as fast as we can feed them - and will go searching for where we have them if we are not fast enough. Getting searched means being slobbered by their trunk so we hand them out as fast as we can. Here are a couple of pictures:

We are only about halfway to the main enclosure when Mae Pond trumpets and both elephants speed up. Bobby explains that they heard baby Jun cry/trumpet and that in that case, the first reaction is for all of the family to gather in a protective circle around the calf.

By the time we reach a large area below the main enclosure, things seem to have calmed down. The mahouts put out large piles of what looks like a combination of sugar cane and corn stalks and the five females come down the hill to join us. Bobby tells us to be careful not to get between Jun and the adults and to generally give Jun more space. He tells us that she is quite mischievous and likes to head butt or pass someone and then reach back to kick with one of her back legs. This is not aggressive; it is only play. But this is not a good thing when you consider that baby Jun already weights close to 300 lbs!

Bobby also tells us that Jun is still nursing and will also be hand fed by her mahout. The other females are happy to grab some sugar cane, hold the stalk with their feet, strip the leaves off with their trunk and pop the stalk into their mouths. Elephants use a wider frequency range than humans and you can sort of hear and feel the low frequency sounds that they are making while they eat. After a while, we hear cow bells, and a bunch of pretty emaciated looking cattle arrive to clean up what food is left. Bobby tells us that Lek not only rescues elephants, but also cattle, monkeys, geese and pigs which explains the cages that we saw driving into the park. He also tells us that they grow their own sugar cane and corn to feed to the elephants as well as coffee to sell in order to buy more food for all of the animals that they protect. All of the people who work here are Karen people from the local villages.

Once all the food is gone, the elephants start snacking on the leaves of some of the trees in the area. They have long since eaten all of the lower leaves and now are using their trunks to try to find leaves, even those that they cannot see. Here are some pictures:

Now that the elephants are fed, it is time for us to eat. Lunch is a vegan buffet. We have vegetarian Khao Soi, spring rolls, a couple of stir-fry dishes with some sort of meat substitute and some sort of dim-sum like steamed buns. It is all great!

By the time we finish lunch, temperatures are back in the mid-90's and it is time to give the elephants a chance to cool off. We walk up the hill to a large field which has a spring-fed pond on one side. The mahouts put out more sugar cane and corn stalks and shortly after, the five females come up the hill. From our vantage point, we can see Kham Saen's enclosure in the distance:

I know that while female elephants stay together for life, males are more solitary. But these are still social animals and even the males form small, more temporary groups. Kham Saen can talk to the other elephants, but I feel sorry for him off on his own.

Bobby tells us that Jun quickly bonded with the matriarch Kham Paeng after she arrived last year, so much so that Kham Paeng gives much more attention to Jun than Jun's mother does. Anytime that Jun appears either upset or frightened, Kham Paeng is right there to sooth her. And when Kham Paeng decides to take a bath in the pond, Jun is right there with her while the other three females are content to eat. Jun and Kham Paeng are still in the water when the cows arrive to clean up the leftovers. When they finally get out of the water, Jun decides that she wants to nurse and while she does, all of the other elephants form a protective barrier around mother and calf. After their lunch, and in some cases, their baths, the elephants head over to the embankment at the edge of this field to apply bug repellent - in this case, this means digging some of the red clay out of the embankment and spraying it all over themselves with their trunks.

The elephants then head back down the hill to the enclosure where they sleep, but we stop at Kham Saen's enclosure. There we find a large bucket of a mixture of rice, overripe bananas and a bunch of things I'm not sure of. Our job is to make balls of this mixture and feed it to Kham Saen much like we did with the watermelons in the morning.  Bobby tells us that Kham Saen is a lot more unpredictable than the females so we should take our hands away right after Kham Saen takes our rice balls to prevent him from getting any ideas for fun at our expense even though he is safely on other side of a quite formidable fence.

Our final job for the day is to make the same sort of rice mixture for the four adult females and feed them through the fence of their enclosure. I'm not sure of everything, but the mixture definitely had rice, Thai bananas (shorter than we are used to), some sort of protein pellets and dried fruit. It makes a kind of sticky glop which makes it easy to shape into balls but also sticks to everything else. We found that the best way was to wet our hands before shaping the balls. The girls all line up and are mostly willing to share (for example, if a person is standing between two elephants). Kham Paeng gives us an example of how smart these elephants are. She has learned that the rice balls are only weakly held together and sometimes split in two when they wrap their trunks around them, so she orients her trunk like a golf tee so you can place the ball on the end of her trunk. Here are some of the many pictures I took:

The future of these elephants is a little uncertain. Asian elephants can live to be perhaps 90 years old so the "old girls" can keep doing this for another 30-50 years, but Jun and Kham Saen are not and will not be domesticated the way that Nong Pop, Mae Pond, Moh Go Nar and Kham Paeng have been so they will not be safe to walk with tourists when they grow up. Kham Saen is not even safe with humans now. So, we are not sure what will happen to parks like this when the habituated elephants die off because even though Jun and Kham Saen have not been habituated to humans, they also haven't learned how to survive in the wild.

But between the money coming from tourists like us, the money they make from their coffee plantation and money from private donors, this business model is working well enough that Lek has expanded groups that she works with into the rest of Thailand as well as Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. If you are ever in this part of the world, we strongly recommend a visit. It was a great experience!