Chai Lai Orchid

Thursday, May 9, 2024

Happy hour at the restaurant was a bit more exciting than usual.

An ever present gecko

An interesting morning visitor

We got up feed them lots of sugar cane. It was interesting to see that different elephants with curl their trunks in different directions when grabbing food in the same way that humans have a dominant hand.

This one kept trying to steal food from the other's mouth.

Wallowing

A baby!

It was so cute and cheeky. We we're warned to keep hold of all our bags otherwise it would probably run them over.

There's always some friendly dogs

Earlier on in the week we stayed a night at Chai Lai Orchid elephant sanctuary near Chiang Mai in Thailand. It's an ethical sanctuary where the elephants are not tethered or forced to entertain tourists, and are not ridden.

There are rustic bungalows where we stayed a night and then did a guided tour the next day. I had been up close to Asian elephants before but these ones seemed especially large. We were lucky enough to see a baby too which was very cute, even if it was already over 400kg!

The sanctuary employs a lot of refugees from Myanmar in a sort of training programme so that they can be better prepared for life in Thailand. Sadly these people are the most at risk from human trafficking so it felt like a worthy cause.

We were quite worried about the ethics of elephant sanctuaries here as it seems like a lot of them are a bit exploitative. Elephants in Thailand are legally considered to be livestock since they've been domesticated for such a long time and the wild population is very small. There's even a problem now of unemployed elephants as a lot of the work they used to do has been taken over by machines. It really felt like the elephants here were well taken care of and were never forced to do anything so I think we made a good choice.

Chai Lai Orchid

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Wallowing

A baby!