Week Two--Elephant Nature Park, Thailand

When we returned back to the Elephant Nature Park after a week in the Karen village in Mae Chem, it felt like utter luxury. We had beds! With mattresses! And mosquito nets! The showers were still ice cold, but we weren’t complaining, because there was a distinct absence of palm-sized spiders inhabiting them. And the food! I cannot do justice to the food at ENP—with about 20 delicious, mostly-veggie offerings at every meal (Curry, curry, curry! Coconut, coconut, coconut!), I was nearly always teetering on ecstasy with the serene smile of food coma on my face.

I spent the days at the park “working,” but the few hours of poop-scooping, washing fruit, making banana balls, feeding the elephants, bathing the elephants, and the hilariously futile cleaning of the mud pit (read: MUD FIGHT!) felt more like fun at camp than hard labor. Apart from one rough morning of cutting very tall, very thick grass by hand with agonizingly dull machetes (motivation for dullness revealed when I very predictably smashed my shin on an over-zealous swing), the only real work was digesting the three enormous meals every day and keeping our camera batteries charged for the postcard-perfect elephants roaming everywhere.

In the middle of the week we had the chance to venture up to “Elephant Haven”—an overnight trip where we walked three of the elephants to veg out in the jungle for awhile—and later to the “New Property” to make mud bricks and build a seed house with the impressive Antoinette, a Dutch woman who started a project called “Bring the Elephant Home,” which focuses on the positive aspects of elephant tourism and in Thailand. I can now dig a hole and mix cement like a pro.

One of the most notable experiences was when Rachel and I turned up at the baby corral one afternoon just in time to catch Lek singing one of the youngest to sleep for its afternoon nap. She beckoned us inside, and as she hummed “Que sera, sera” and Rachel stroked Pha Mai's trunk, the enormous baby shoved me underneath her belly, where I sat, neck bent below her swaying girth, for half an hour. “She trusts you,” Lek told me solemnly. “She wants to be your mama.”

My time at ENP was mostly light, fun, and an amazing chance to be up close and personal with these creatures, shoving basketfuls of watermelon at their waiting trunks and watching them play on the ele gym while I sipped Chang beer with friends on the patio. But there was another, more educational aspect to the whole experience as well, a lot of which was heart-wrenching. I don’t think it’d be fair if I didn’t share some of it here…

If I took away anything from the ENP, it’s the knowledge that the Asian elephant, though revered throughout Thailand and a prominent figure in Thai culture in everything from temples to the King’s palace, currently lives a life of intense suffering, and its days are numbered. In the past 100 years, elephants in Thailand have dwindled from almost 100,000 to barely 3,000, and those that remain live under torturous conditions:

Jokia, an elderly elephant at the park, was blinded in both eyes by her mahout when she was slacking on the logging job right after the death of her newborn. Mae Do could barely walk because her hip had been broken and deformed from a breeding camp in which up to forty males are forced on a single female. It was painful to watch her hobble around, but worse to see her become terrified and incontinent around Hope and Jungle Boy, the young males at the park. These are just a couple of the Park’s stories—others include survivors of land mines and drug addicts—but nearly all Asian elephants encounter misery early on in their lives. When they are three or four years old, all working elephants in Thailand (which is almost all of the population—very few are currently wild) undergo pujam, a breaking ceremony where they are placed in a cage, stabbed with hooks, beaten with clubs, and shouted at for four days to a week. Almost half die in this process. Elephants live to around the same age as humans and have similar developmental stages. They are also incredibly intelligent, emotional, social animals—if I’m remembering right, the only other animal besides man that cries tears. Imagine a toddler tortured for a week with nails. Imagine what impact that has developmentally. Or what it does to its mother.

Please, please, please, if you visit countries where elephants are part of the tourist industry, don’t give money or bananas to mahouts begging with their elephants in the streets. Resist the draw of elephant treks, elephant paintings, elephant dancing and elephant sports. No matter how legit some of these operations may seem on the surface, those elephants have almost universally been beaten into submission for our entertainment.

Before coming to the Park, I thought elephants were really cool. I thought logging was bad for the environment. I never would’ve condoned the mistreatment of animals, but didn’t see anything wrong with riding elephants, either, and even looked into a hill trek that ended in an elephant ride. But Jennifer and Bryn recommended the ENP, and I’m so grateful I took their advice. If you do still want an amazing, close-up elephant experience in Thailand that promotes sustainability and conservation through education, I can’t recommend The Elephant Nature Park strongly enough. Check them out at www.elephantnaturepark.org. I’m definitely going back.

Month Two

In my second month on the road, I kicked off my first foray into Asia with Hong Kong and then Thailand. I have to admit, despite the language barrier, different seasons (wet and dry), new systems of transportation navigation, and more conservative dress, I didn’t experience much culture shock and found it fairly easy to acclimate myself. I do realize, however, that this was likely because a) Hong Kong is super Westernized, b) apart from an organized trip to a Karen village, I clung very closely to the beaten path in Thailand, and c) almost everyone everywhere seems to speak enough English to help a girl out when I’m looking at everything in big eyed, confused wonder.

I’ve definitely gotten more comfortable with the nomadic lifestyle; as I meet more and more travelers—gap year students, retirees, couples who’ve sold their homes and quit their jobs, families with young children—at this point, it’s actually starting to feel like staying put is what’s abnormal. This might be the longest period of time I go for alone, but I’ve started to realize that I need this, regularly, at least for a short amount of time. Maybe I’ll go for a month each year, or for six weeks, but there are so many places to see, I know it’ll take my whole lifetime to even make a dent.

From spending the majority of my time in HK holed up in my guesthouse alone without much human contact, I’ve definitely been savoring the islands of interaction with friends along the way more this past month. My best times have been spent joking about hipsters with John, battling feral monkeys with Wayne and Nicole, and shoveling shit and avoiding arachnids with Rachel. I also came to accept that traveling constantly doesn’t have to mean constantly doing things. I chill out at home, and can have off days here as well—even if home is a hotel room.

I learned quite a bit this month, of course: I learned to savor every single thing I put in my mouth. I learned to bargain well and with a smile, how to eat a crab, to give a Thai massage, to cook a mean red curry, to count and say hello and thanks in multiple languages, to rock climb (well, at least to start to), to tie a secure belay knot, to make banana balls, to mix cement, to stop traveler’s diarrhea dead in its tracks, and to understand the meaning of “Thai time.”

I also learned that it’s not how pretty your feet look, it’s how well they serve you to navigate tiny alleys and dusty hilltops. Even without toenails. This one’s for you, Rebecca:

Favorite place: Tonsai Bay, Thailand

Favorite experience: Being mommied by Pha Mai, the baby elephant

Favorite meal: Tie between spicy crab in Hong Kong and every meal I had at the Elephant Nature Park

Favorite saying: "Same same…but different.”

Favorite lodging: The homestay in the Karen village—at least in retrospect.

Week One, ENP--Mae Chem, Thailand

After two weeks at the Elephant Nature Park, cut off from the real world, and after nearly a month away from this blog, it’s hard to know how to sum up my recent activities. I’ll give it my best shot. The park is about an hour and a half from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. It’s home to 32 elephants and is run by Lek Chailert (“Lek” is a nickname that means “small” in Thai), the passionate, incredibly well-spoken founder, whose mission is to save the Asian elephant, which is currently edging toward extinction, and advocate against the systematic torture that is a given for working elephants in Thailand.

Rachel and I were paired up from the very first day, and I felt like I hit the jackpot, roomie-wise. She was super laid back, we had a similar sense of humor (that is, we laughed at the absurdity of almost every situation—from the ant infestation to her dubiously risque massage to the rats eating my underwear to shoveling poop while less-enthusiastic volunteers took pictures of us shoveling poop), and she was also traveling on her own, taking four months off from her job as a mental health nurse in England.

After dinner on the first night, Rachel and I stumbled upon Lek giving a talk to around a dozen other volunteers at a picnic table. Lek motioned for us to sit down and we listened for awhile as she described a hill tribe six hours away in Mae Chem, where volunteers would sleep in the villagers’ huts, do “whatever needed to be done,” and spend two days walking in the jungle with the Karen people’s elephants, among them two babies. At the end of the talk, Lek asked who wanted to go on this “Journey to Freedom,” a week-long trip from the park. As everyone else raised their hands, Rachel and I looked at each other. We had two weeks at ENP. Did we want to go? Oh, yes.

At 8am the next morning, we were clenching our teeth as our van barreled north down the back roads, shooting past buses and mopeds around hairpin turns on the edge of cliffs sorely in need of a guardrail. We later switched out of the van and spent the last hour of the trip standing up, bumping along a two track through the jungle and past fields of cabbage as we climbed higher and higher up the mountains.

The village looked down from its perch to the dense, green valley below, and the 13 of us were welcomed into three homes. Our house mother was really curious about us at first, and watched everything we did with extreme interest; the first night, she didn’t leave the doorway until all four of us had closed our eyes to sleep. The lives of the Karen people definitely contrasted my own more than any I’d seen up to this point. The huts were made of bamboo, some of them beautifully woven, others Spartan, some with decorative windows, others missing walls. Hogs, dogs, water buffalo, and chickens lived beneath the houses. The women wore beautiful sarongs which they wove, and only virgins were permitted to make the shockingly strong rice whiskey.

We spent the first couple of days generally being a nuisance to the villagers. No, that’s probably wrong, but it certainly felt that way much of the time. We had three vet students with us, and they led the group in vaccinating the abundance of dogs and cats for rabies and de-worming them. We also attempted to “build” a “shower,” which really meant that we knocked down a perfectly good bathroom (only built in the first place for Western visitors) in front of expertly-constructed new homes and, with no tools, nails, wood, leadership, or carpentry experience, managed to rig up a very precarious and hilariously lopsided shack with no roof. We even managed to jam a hole in the hose that was to supply said shower in the process. But regardless of the outcome, we did our damndest, and I think all of us knew that it was more the money we (and the ENP) paid that mattered, less our construction successes.

Toward the end of the week, we met the elephants. The mother, a teenage daughter, and four month-old twins are owned by one of the families in the village. It’s historically a sign of prestige for the Karen to own an elephant, but these days the villagers are usually far removed from their elephants and rent them out to logging camps or trekking camps. The elephants can earn far more a day in logging season than their owners can (300 baht/$10/a day versus 3 baht/day), so it’s a hard sell to fight the camps. In the case of these four elephants, the ENP essentially pays the owner instead to insure that the elephants can NOT work. As such, we got to don some gum boots/Wellies and plod after the elephants in the surrounding dense jungle, sloshing through mud and rivers lined with webs filled with these palm-sized spiders:

Apparently Hugh walked smack into a web and ended up with one of the nightmarish suckers on his face, but because he is both quiet-natured and Australian (i.e. used to unfathomably grotesque arachnids), he just brushed it off and waited until we were leaving the village to casually mention it to anyone.

In the evenings, we sat with the locals around a campfire under a sky glowing with more stars than I imagined existed. The oldest woman in the village, Sozu, who was 65, took a liking to me and linked her arm in mine. With no common language and no shared background, we could barely communicate, but we laughed and laughed as she tried to teach me to count to ten in Karen (Deh, Kee, Suh, Louie, Zeh, Ho, Nouie, Huh, Kwee, T’chee) and I tried to teach her the English equivalent. We had a chance to ask the Karen people about their culture and they questioned us in turn (“How old are you?” “Where do you come from?” “Why do you come here?” “What do you do at home?”) Jobs like “marketing assistant” and “children’s book writer” were a bit lost in translation, though Dino did his best.

Poor Dino. Dino was our guide throughout the week, and after a day or two, I began to pity him what must have been the overwhelmingly frustrating task of managing us: translating between us and the Karen (whose language seemed to have more French influence than Thai), the Karen and us, answering every imaginable question about the elephants and the Karen people, directing our hourly tasks in the village, all while explaining where we needed to sleep, when we would eat, where we’d go next, how many local customs we’d offended in the last five minutes, and how to manage the toilet (Tip: in Thailand, toilet paper does NOT go in the toilet. Ever.).

We also had a chance to buy the beautifully woven scarves, bags, sarongs, and shirts that the women had made. After we left, we learned that the women don’t sell their wares at the market in Chiang Mai or elsewhere. The woven items they’d made, they’d done so only to sell to us. When I learned this I remembered the stacks of scarves and bags, a dozen women’s eyes watching me intently. I wished I would’ve bought every single thing on that table.

I find it hard to know how to talk about some of my experiences with accuracy, honesty, and sensitivity, because so much seems marred by the haze of my own feelings of guilt—of my own excess, my privilege. (I expect this will be magnified in India.) The children had worms because of bare feet combined with rare toilet usage. There were starving dogs everywhere. The women chewed betel nuts so were spitting constantly, the oldest among them with very decayed teeth. It seemed…simple. Primitive. But it feels unfair to call it that, too. Only from a Western lens does it seem that way. To the Karen people, who seemed extremely happy living in their picturesque jungle paradise, it is only their life. The life they’ve always known. This was not a trek with an agency, which might cart ten groups a day through, encouraging the kids to beg for change and gifts. This was a trip set up through a conservationist organization with the goal of keeping more elephants out of logging camps just over the border in Burma, encouraging a closer relationship with the Karen and their elephants (as they once had decades ago), while providing them with a way to earn income. I know these things. But I struggled because it still felt wrong to be there, somehow. It felt like disturbing the peace.

The night before we left, Dino fielded questions around the campfire again. An older man asked something, and Dino shrugged, looking at us. “He wants to know if you’ll come back.” All of the villagers nodded and smiled.

As the Thais like to say, mai ben rai. No worries. We'll figure it out.

*Note: All names and phrases were a total guess as far as spelling. I'll do a separate post on my week spent at the actual Elephant Nature Park.

Thailand Picture Post

Hey guys... I'm baaaaaack!

Sorry to be incommunicado for so long. The Elephant Nature Park was fantastic, but it was much harder to get web access than I'd thought. I'll have a couple longer posts up soon, but for now, here, as promised, is the picture post from my time in Bangkok and Tonsai.

Elephant pics coming soon!

Bangkok and Tonsai

*Note: Haven’t uploaded photos of Thailand yet, but I wanted to get this update in before I head to the elephant park. Photo update will follow later.

I arrived in Bangkok on Sunday night and met up with Wayne, a friend from high school (and my prom date, haha) who I hadn’t seen since we graduated (Ten years! Man, I feel old). He and his girlfriend, Nicole, are, auspiciously, doing a round the world trip now as well, and we happen to be hitting up a lot of the same places. We wandered around the city together a bit, poking in temples-under-repair (those gilded windows are all painted by hand!), meandering around the frenzied tourist hub of Kaosan Road, and chowing down on both curry and insects. It was a good introduction to Thailand, but I also found Bangkok totally overwhelming with its farang-focused markets, pushy touts, and seedy sex tourism, and wasn’t so sure I wanted to hang out there alone for a full week as planned before heading to Chiang Mai. I also had a great time with W&N, who were headed to rock climb near Krabi, and was kind of depressed at the idea of being alone again.

On Tuesday I decided it would be great to hang around with friends for a bit longer, so a last-minute flight, a cab ride, and two longtail boat rides later, I arrived at Tonsai, a beachy climbers’ haven in the south. Tonsai is ultra chill, with a strangely rural, jungly feel, even while it’s crawling with white/Western Rastafarian backpackers. I stayed in a teeny tiny hut with a mosquito net (which I came to foolishly, desperately believe was a forcefield that protected me from not only mosquitoes, but rats, geckos, roaches, and ginormous spiders, all of which I had seen up close and personal around the area). An arachnophobic, I think I'll eternally resent Wayne for ever showing me the web with a certain enormous, sinister monster crouched in the middle). Either way, I grew very attached to my little abode, and was sad to leave it in the end.

My week in Tonsai passed in a blissful blur of red curry for every meal (Phed mak mak!—very very spicy), countless banana shakes, doggy paddling in the warm waters of the Andaman Sea, ultra cheap yet ultra terrific Thai massages from Didi and Sa, working, and hanging out with my friends at a bizarre open mic night, during which many jokes were exchanged regarding a peculiar character called “Dave 1.”

On Saturday, we got up before the sun rose to beat the morning rush of climbers over on Railey Beach. Using Wayne and Nicole’s gear and with their expert coaching, I had my first go at rock climbing in a world-class location, full of insane stalactites and really cool crags. Despite what it might look like at first when you see ten year old kids scuttling up the bare face of the cliff quick as spiders and when you watch people like Wayne and Nicky expertly maneuvering their limbs using invisible toeholds with hip-twisting grace, let me tell you, climbing is hard . With Nicole belaying me, I felt totally safe, but physically, it pushed me to my limits. It’s incredibly frustrating when you just want to GET THERE, and mentally, you have total willpower and confidence in your ability to do it, but your body just fails you and you fall, again and again. It doesn’t help that I have arms like noodles with zero upper body strength. I have some serious rope burn and bruises that make me look hardcore, but mostly it was my ego that took a bit of a beating—a dangerous situation that always makes me want to do it AGAIN, and BETTER. I can see how people get addicted to the rush; I’m already investigating climbing classes in NYC. Sweet.

At Phra Nang beach—epically beautiful, a la Garland’s “The Beach,” but very busy—we had a mid-afternoon swim and peeked into the bizarre phallic shrine (think wooden penises—peni?—everywhere). We also saw around a dozen monkeys. Close up! And with day-old baby monkeys clutching at them. As much as I didn’t want to be the stereotypical tourist, I couldn’t help but gawk. I’d upload a video here if it wasn’t so huge.

Later, it was time to wave farewell to Wayno and Nicky, and to Tonsai. I could’ve probably stayed there for another full month, vegging and learning to climb, but Chiang Mai with its elephants was beckoning. While I waited for enough people to gather for a longtail ride to Ao Nang, we decided to post up at a beach bar and split a bucket of Samsong and coke. Naturally, on the way there, a monkey leapt from a tree onto my back and attempted to throttle me. Because that is the type of thing that happens in Tonsai. Luckily (and also sadly), the little booger ended up being tethered to the tree, so while I panicked and shrieked bloody murder, Nicky and Wayne shouted to “Keep walking!” and soon I was free from his tenacious grip. Authentic Thai experience right there, folks.

Tomorrow I’m headed to the Elephant Nature Park. I’m there for two weeks, and internet will be spotty, so don’t worry if things are a bit quiet around here.

Updates

I'm currently in Bangkok, but after having a great time with Wayno and Nicky (involving whiskey and grasshoppers* in soy sauce...), I've decided to follow them down to Krabi before heading up to Chiang Mai next week.

Update on the remainder of my time in Hong Kong coming soon.


Also, some bigger news: I cancelled the South American leg of my trip.

After traveling fairly quickly through New Zealand last month, I realized that I might get more out of this experience if I slowed down a bit. I had planned to do three countries in South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Peru) in just under a month, which seemed way too fast. Since I'm not able to extend my trip for longer (and am not sure I'd want to, anyway), I decided to stay in Africa for a bit longer and join a volunteer program in Uganda. I'm still returning in the beginning of August, but South America will have to wait until next time.

*Note: I have a hunch that most Thai people do not in fact feast on scorpions and insects and that the stalls exist solely for tipsy tourists, but it was all in good fun nonetheless.