Happy Elephants in Thailand

Photo by Into the Wild Elephant Camp

Hey y’all,

So, yesterday I hung out with half a dozen elephants.

If you are ever in Chiang Mai, the most ethical company for this kind of tour is Into the Wild Elephant Camp. Due to animal activism, many of the companies have shifted away from riding elephants to caring for them.

However, many are still putting these magnificent creatures into pens and chaining them up, and not caring for them all that well. We saw them at other camps on the way to this one.

At this place, the elephants roam the property freely and they are VERY happy elephants.

Here’s the link:

https://www.intothewildelephantcamp.com/

Elephants are awesome! Intimidating, but awesome, and yesterday was magical. Even if I got injured, it was a fabulous day.

For the record, it wasn’t the elephants’ fault. It was the guide’s for guiding me to wet, jagged rocks and mine for not sticking with the direction I had chosen.

I was part of a group of 6 who signed up for the all-day experience. A solo dude traveler from Scotland, a couple from Ireland, a brother and sister from Germany, and me.

As soon as we arrived, we changed into red poncho-type tops, so the elephants would recognize us as their herd.

I think sugar cane helped sweeten them up towards us because that’s the first thing we did. We each got a bag of sugar cane the same color as our poncho, and the elephants were all about us then.

6 elephants for 6 of us. 2 large, fully grown elephants and 4 young and growing elephants.

Sometime next year, it will be 7 elephants because one of them is pregnant. She’s 1 year into it, and we could feel her baby bump on both sides.

Did you know elephants are pregnant for 2 YEARS??!!!! Our guide told us the baby elephant will be about 2 meters when it’s born. Poor elephant mama!

The elephants ignored the 1 elephant/person rule and swarmed to whomever had sugar cane in hand. Since I took my time feeding my elephant, I still had sugar cane when everybody else was out. At one point, I was swarmed with 3 elephant trunks around me.

They could smell the sugar, I tell you.

I guess elephants, like humans, have a thing for sweetness.

Anyway, our tour entailed feeding the elephants, hiking with the elephants, hanging out with the elephants while they fed on anything green, coming back for lunch, feeding the pregnant elephant our lunch leftovers (she was the only one who hung around where we were eating), smashing and mashing the “elephant medicine” – came from the source, various foods like rice, bananas, sugar cane cubes, and bitter root and other stuff mashed together manually to make a ball of vitamin and mineral mush – and feeding them a ball of gunk apiece.

Then we gave the elephants a mud bath and took them to the deeper pond where they rolled around in the water.

Photo by Into the Wild Elephant Camp

We splashed them and they splashed us. But they were definitely more comfortable and playful with the staff who works with and cares for them every day. They acted like giant, goofy dogs – especially the young elephants, who sprayed all of us from their trunks.

The two giants were more dignified. One of them wouldn’t get in the pool with us. The pregnant one did though. But no rolling around in the water for her.

Anyway, to experience this piece of specialness was worth slipping on a rock. That happened at the first leg of the hike. We walked single file with elephants in front of and behind us.  

I had fallen behind with Scottish Joey and the elephants made it to the creek ahead of us. They splashed and sprayed themselves and got the rocks wet. Joey found another route further up the creek bed. I was taking that way, and should have stuck with it because the rocks were dry.

But like an idiot, I listened to the guide who said the rocks right next to the elephants were a better route.

It wasn’t.

Photo by yours truly!

I made it across two rocks before I slipped on the third. I fell on my right shin and flopped gracelessly into the creek.

I was right next to the elephants when it happened, and made some kind of shriek because my leg hurt like hell. The guides got me out of there quickly and the elephants made snuffling, distressed noises and came out of the creek when I did, swinging their trunks and one of the bigger ones was scratching the ground with its giant foot.

“See, the elephants are worried about you! They know something happened and it scared them too.”

I don’t know if that was actually true, or if the guide lied to keep me from freaking out.

I was more than a little intimidated. I felt compelled to bow to the elephants to tell them I was fine, even with blood streaming down my leg.

No OCD concerns about germs, health, and safety over here. One of the guides patted at my wounds with his sandy hands, and the Irish nurse cringed and thought to herself: “Oh, don’t do that. Don’t do that.”

We kept hiking.

Photo by Into the Wild Elephant Camp

Other than asking me if I was all right from time to time, the tour went on and the guide assured me I’d get my leg cleaned up during lunch.

“Do you have antibacterial cream?”

“We have alcohol.”

We hung out with the elephants that ignored us as they fed on the grasses and branches and tore down anything that was in their way.

My throbbing, torn up leg distracted me some, but no way was I going to let that get in the way.

At lunch, my leg did get cleaned up while I listened to the Europeans discussing politics.

It started with Scottish Joey asking if they thought Britain was nuts because of Brexit. Apparently, a big election is happening in Ireland as well. And it struck me how much knowledge they had over the social and political state of their respective countries.

Then it was time for elephant medicine, mud baths and the swim.

Swimming with the elephants was my favorite part, and it was also the grand finale. I forgot my bathing suit, but I still went in.

So yeah, I’m having some gorgeous experiences on this trip.

Peace,

Mana

The Lucky Traveler

Buddhist Temple

Hey y'all,

So I'm in Thailand.

After 2 days of exhausting travel, this trip is already off to an incredible start. Except for the Tantra workshop that starts today, I came here with no plans and no itinerary, just freewheeling it as I go along.

It's one thing to do that on home ground where I speak the language with my own vehicle to get around. It's another to do that on the other side of the world when I've never been to SE Asia before.

For a change, Facebook actually served its original purpose of connecting people to each other. I know Kip from my time in Alaska, and I haven't seen him in over 10 years.

Anyway, he saw my posts about traveling to Chiang Mai - and since he is conveniently in Chiang Mai - he reached out via FB I spent my first night in Thailand wandering around the night market with Kip and 2 new Alaskan friends - Angela and Nate, who are both taking 2 week Thai massage courses.

We ate a yummy vegan (you would have loved this, Sabby!) Thai dinner on wood plates (they even had wood straws) in a hole-in-the-wall gem of a place.

What do we eat?

I may even take a cooking class there when I'm done with my Taoist and Tantra Sex, Energy, and Ecstatic Love workshop.

Anyway, Kip and Angela are going to Laos on a Mekong River trip after she's done, and I've already been invited to join them. They mentioned interest in hearing all about this workshop, especially after I read to them the course descriptions.

Of course, I'll join them because the timing is perfect and because I can, and I'm here to have spontaneous adventures.

These are the advantages of traveling solo with no itinerary.

And I'd be an idiot not to.

Kip is one of those people that you hear about before you meet him. He's a legend among his friends. He works out of Anchorage now, but was part of a gorgeously wonderful group out of Skagway when I met him.

The people who called Skagway home were unbelievably warm and friendly, not to mention incredible fun. The year round population there is maybe 300 people in the winter, but it goes way up to more than 1500 when the summer people come back. Many of the summer people travel like lunatics in the winter before coming to Skagway to work for the summer - and they come back every year and some eventually settle down there.

My first impression of that town was pretty vivid.  A group of us from Juneau went to Skagway for a weekend of partying someplace that wasn't Juneau. The main drag of Skagway looks like a movie set of the mining days and the wild West or Wild Alaskan days.

But Mo's was the local bar that was too plain to draw in the tourists. This is where the locals went when they were done entertaining the tourist fantasy of the last Frontier.

So we hung out at Mo's and watched the locals as they let their hair down and came out of character to be themselves, drinking and smoking, etc.

Then "Get Together" by the Youngbloods comes on over the sound system and magic happened. The locals all stopped their conversations, started bopping their heads back and forth to the music, and with happy, smiling faces, sung the refrain:

"Come on, people now,

Smile on your brother,

Everybody get together,

And try to love one another

Right now."

 

And they did that with every refrain. It was surreal.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRbTvoxRNxM

 

Alaskans are amazing people, and some of the strongest souls I've ever known I know from my time there. However, they are not warm and fuzzy. Skagway is the outlier.

I don't know if Kip was at Mo’s that night, but he and his posse would have fit right in with bopping heads, smiling faces, and singing voices.

I didn't meet him until a few years later when one of his friends, Paul, was in my Tlingit Culture and History class and became one of my friends. His Skagway friends came to see him often in Juneau, so his friends became my friends, and that was how I got to know just how awesome Skagway folks were - and I'm sure still are.

Paul and friends had done some pretty impressive travels, but they all claimed to revere Kip as The Man when it came to high adventure. And they were only half joking.

He was not what I expected when I met him. I was expecting somebody more studly and less odd, but Kip was as awesome and joyful and free and larger-than-life as his friends described him.

He still is.

If you can imagine a Generation X Dean Moriarty of On the Road - much healthier, less drug-addled, but with the same high energy who has been everywhere, that gives a pretty accurate image of Kip. He really is a restless soul with a gypsy heart, who never met a stranger and is in constant motion.

This man has been EVERYWHERE

"Haven't you traveled all over the world?" I asked.

"Well, I've never been to the Philippines," Kip answered.

Jetlagged me struggled to keep up my first night. But he kept me up and running, so I didn't sleep during the day. Thus I became acclimated (sort of) to Thailand time.

I think it's an auspicious sign that my journey started with Kip.

 

Peace,

Mana