Wandering the World: Elephant riding and elephant babies

Here's the rest of our elephant excursion.

Dec 9 – The Elephant Conservation Center

We were up early this morning for a 7:30 breakfast. Afterwards we went on a walk through the woods with the elephants, their Mahouts and our guide. It was a nice walk and our guide pointed out different plants to us and had us taste a few too. The ones he had us taste were quite sour. After our walk we were at the training center and got to not only mount the elephants but try to give them directions too. It was really cool. We had to get the elephant to go, stop, go backwards, turn right and turn left. I think the mahouts helped us out a little. The elephant I was on, Mae Kham Ohn, didn't want to back up for me. She's apparently the stubborn one. After we gave the elephants a treat of banana tree. The don't like the bark so they peel it off and then eat the insides. It was interesting to watch them hold part of the tree in their trunk while using the tip to pick out what they wanted. The trunks are amazingly dexterous. The elephants were taken by their mahouts back into the forest for their lunch while we had a little free time before our lunch time. After lunch we went with a different guide into the elephant nursery area. She told us about future plans for the area, they hope to build a platform so guests can safely watch the mother and baby elephants. We went down to the lake and got on the boat that was tied up there while the mothers and their babies made their own way down to the water with their mahouts. There are two mothers and two babies. One baby is female and about 6 months old, the other male and is only 2 months. The mother elephants share the care of the babies and work together to feed them and keep them safe. They were very protective of the babies at first, keeping themselves between the boat and the babies but after a little bit they relaxed and the little ones were allowed to romp around. The baby girl was rolling around in the water and was curious about us on the boat. The little one was a bit shy and kept hiding under mum and weaving under her legs. The two babies played together too. The little one was biting the others ear. It was very sweet and reminded me a lot of what human children do. We headed back to the center by boat and the other three elephants were having their bath time again. Mae Boun Nam was having a great time dunking her mahout as usual. There were new guests that had arrived this afternoon so it was a full house at the center. While the new people went with elephants back into the forest, we had a shower and relaxed a little with a beer. We headed up to the restaurant around dinner time and Beau played a little Boche ball (they called it something different) with the locals. Dinner was close to ready and all the lights went out at the restaurant. This is the problem with depending solely on solar energy for your power. It was very overcast today so the batteries didn't charge up enough. We ate by candle light and eventually one of the workers got back from town where I guess they picked up a new battery. The lights came back on right as we were finishing dinner. The center has a few little kinks to work out still but eating by candle light isn't so bad.