My day started with a scream of ‘FUCK IT’S 7AM!’ from 5*. ‘Oh no. I’m on Aussi time. It’s only 4. Sorry’

At the real 7am, we went to the Elephant Nature Park’s head office round the corner from Pat’s. We got given work t-shirts and water bottles and started introducing ourselves to the other ‘volunteers’ for that week. 19. All nationalities but predominately Israeli. I’ve never met an Israeli I don’t think. Their English is better than mine. We were loaded into 2 mini buses and off we went up into the jungle.
I feel like I don’t really know where to start talking about the park itself. It’s had a pretty huge impact on me.
I will try to be as concise as Julesy-ly possible.

I was ignorant to the plight of the Asian Elephant historically and politically. I know that African Elephants smash down trees and are much more grand and beautiful what with their lovely big flappy ears’n’all. I thought maybe the Asian ones were just the ones you could train to do tricks. I think if I had come across an Elephant in Bangkok doing a painting or an Ele-Football match I would have thought “Oooh look at that. Aren’t they clever!?…. anyway, lunch anyone?”

The Elephant Nature Park was set up by a 4ft6 woman called ‘Lek’ (meaning small) as a place of sanctuary for mistreated Elephants from Thailand and Burma. The Elephants are rescued from trekking camps, circus performing, street begging and other tourist attractions. Each Elephant has a Mahout that looks after it and trains it. They stay near the Elephant 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The bond between them is incredible. The 33 Elephants have formed 5 family groups and are free to roam in the park’s land and river. Every Elephant has it’s own story. Many have been blinded and are deformed from rape and malnutrition. By the end of the week you had really got to know their different personalities. They way they look after and communicate with each other is incredible. ‘Hope’ the naughty teenage bull, has to wear a bell around his neck so you can hear him coming. He is so mischievous, he has 2 Mahouts that you constantly see running after him as he teases the babies, breaks things and tries to escape across the river to a local farmer’s sugar cane farm. I liked him. He was rescued just before he was due to be ‘crushed’ which is the traditional process by which a young elephant is trained to be subservient to it’s human master. The ‘Crush’ is a tiny cage where the elephant is tied and beaten with hooks and sticks with nails in for as long as it takes for it to stop resisting and struggling. The average time is about 2 weeks. It’s been happening for years and is effective. Once the spirit is broken, and they do not struggle, they can be trained to do anything. I’ve seen videos. Google image search it.
Lek’s vision is to teach the mahouts an alternative form of training. Like the way we westerners would train a dog- positive rewards etc etc. Elephants are so bloody clever. She has trained some of them to follow up to 20 commands- lift a foot to be checked, open mouth wide, lie down etc- mostly for medical reasons. All without a hook. Watching her with the baby ones is like witnessing the frigging Elephant whisperer. I saw her make one stand still, slowly slump to the floor and fall asleep while she fanned it with a cloth. Incredible.

As a volunteer at the park you are expected to work. Hard. Really hard. Morning chores are scrubbing a million pieces of fruit and veg for a day’s feeding and shovelling shit. This is at 8am. In 37 degrees. Then the Daily ‘job’ starts at 9. Normally this involves such things as: cutting corn, planting grasses/trees, teaching at the local school and doing building work around the park. Stop for lunch, then maybe do some feeding and washing in the river then back to work in the afternoon.
There was a monsoon the second day we arrived and the river flooded badly sweeping away a lot of the bank down one side of the park. Huts, precariously close to being washed away needed to be saved. So, the 19 of us helped the other staff to re-build the river bank and secure the huts. Bring on the sand-bagging. We needed about 1000 to secure it. It was hardcore. Filling bags with earth for hours at a time in that heat was really challenging. Especially as I kept getting people to play singing games with me. I think they wanted to put me in a bag. But, I persevered and the spirits remained high! I’m no quitter when it comes to motivational singing games. It was a welcome break from the toil when the baby elephants assumed we were making a sand-pit for them to roll in and starting jumping and tumbling all over the place. At one particularly weary moment I suggested using the Elephants to load the trailer with these ridiculously heavy sandbags ‘seeing as they are just hanging about doing nothing’ That didn’t go down to well and so I went to re-fill my water-bottle.
After the sandbags had been moved buy tiny humans and not the Elephants, the lorries of rocks started to turn up and be dumped at our sweaty feet. Rock by rock, we loaded a small tractor and then unloaded them down a line into the wire cages that were to form the new bank.
The whole process took 3 days. Hard hard days. But at the end, we had saved the huts. The bank. The park. The Elephants. Who knows, maybe even the world? Hurrah for us. It’s quite amazing how proper labour can bond people together- a shared goal I guess. Anyway, each night we celebrated after supper with a few Singha’s and a game or two of Taki (Israeli Uno) and we were all exhausted and grazed and asleep by 9ish.

We were down to 13 volunteers by the end of the week- some people just can’t stand the sandbagging heat. (one couple, on their honeymoon, were excused in my mind. I mean. I don’t think it’s quite what they had in mind)
One of the days we were not doing Operation Save the Bank, we went to help out at a local school. The park obviously does this every week and the kids at the school have got wise to it. They go mental- jumping on you, nicking your glasses, grabbing your camera and fucking-off with it, trying to flog you dried bananas. The teachers also obviously see it as a bit of a morning off and they disappear as soon as you arrive. It was a bit to much like a busman’s holiday for me so I went to have a massage from a tiny woman near a fan.

One of the highlights for me was the night I spent sleeping on a platform at the edge of the baby’s pen. Watching the mother and the ‘nanny’ (mummy Elephants need some help apparently the lazy mares) settle the baby to sleep. Elephants can sleep standing up- you know when they are because their trunks go still. They also lie down if they feel very secure. The three of them all snuggled together in the earth, snored loudly and farted even louder all night long. All lit by the moon. Was very memorable indeed.
I met some lovely people- lots I have spent time with since and without wishing to sound wanky, I think it was a pretty special experience for all of us.
Obviously I was snap-happy and you can see the results on flickr.

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