Elephant Nature Park, Chiang Mai - My travel diary

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During my stay in Chiang Mai, I always wanted to visit an elephant farm or camp because for me elephants are one of the most amazing animals on earth.
In Chiang Mai or generally in Thailand you need to be a little bit careful with "Elephant Parks or Farms". Many tourist offices offer elephant rides, elephant trekking or elephant shows but PLEASE never do that. For me, the elephant Industry is one of the most disgusting ways to make money. Elephants who paint, play soccer or do anything else to entertain tourists, need to go through a very hard process when they are babies. Their owner called MAHOUT is breaking the elephant´s spirit to the point until they allow humans to interact with them. The Mahout uses for this process many times a bull hook to punish the elephants for misbehavior. During this process, the elephants are all the time on chains, can´t lay down or even move. Those beautiful animals have to go through a terrible time for weeks.
The Mahout will always use the bull hook to punish the elephant. If you ride an elephant and he doesn´t behave well, he just beats him/her with the hook. Of course, then the elephant bleeds. In such elephant farms, elephants will never experience freedom. They will be always on chains.

For me, it was sure that I will never ever support that but I also knew that I really want to visit elephants. I often heard about the elephant nature park but I didn´t know what exactly it was. I started to do some researches about this park and I found out that it´s a sanctuary for rescued elephants.
When my best friend visited me in Chiang Mai, I told her about it and she loved the idea so we decided to book our trip to "The elephant nature park Chiang Mai". There are a lot of similar nature parks in and around Chiang Mai. But we chose the nature park because from all the parks, this one had the best reviews.

To go to the nature park costs 2500 baht which are around 70$. This trip takes a full day and includes transfer and lunch. They picked us up at around 8 in the morning. The nature park is located 60km outside of Chiang Mai city.
Once we arrived there, they gave us a short introduction and they told us, of what we need to take care.
The nature park doesn´t only have rescued elephants. They also have a lot of street dogs and cats which need help.

Once our guide explained everything we started to walk and we explored the huge area.

While we walked, our guide constantly told us about the history of the park. In the 1990´s a woman called Lek Chailert, started to work with elephants. She wanted to rescue elephants from street begging, riding etc. At the time she started to work with elephants, the park was located in a jungle and from time to time she rescued more elephants and the area got bigger and bigger. Now they take care of more than 35 elephants an more than 350 cats and dogs.
Today, the park is a huge area where the animals, especially the elephants, can walk free and in nature.
Every elephant has still it´s own Mahout (the person who takes care). But in that case, the Mahout follows his elephant the whole day that the elephant doesn´t escape as it is a free area. The Mahout also feeds his elephant. So basically the Mahout gives the elephant everything he needs. But there is no violence. And the most important thing is that there is no hook. So nobody can hurt the elephants for their misbehavior.
You can really see that the elephants are super happy there.

The nature park offers another great option. If you want to work with elephants you can apply for a volunteer position. They are always happy to have people who help with cleaning, feeding or repair broken stuff.

They also have their own medicine room where they can take care of wounds etc. As there are only elephants which were treated very bad, they most of the time arrive with broken legs, broken hips or even worse, at the park. If the crew of the nature park can not help the elephants by themselves, they need to bring them to a special animal hospital.

The food for all the animals comes from donations. So the volunteers and the crew pick up melons, grass etc. from local farmers. As you can imagine, the park has a huge storage for all the food.

After we had lunch we walked down to the river where we had a bath with the elephants.
Elephants need the natural mud and dirt to protect themselves from a sunburn. A lot of elephants arrive at the park with a sunburn and blisters because where they lived before, there is most of the time no river with mud or dirt to protect themselves from the sun.

After the bath, we had a little bit of time for ourselves to explore the area before our bus brought us back to Chiang Mai.

On our way back my friend said to me that she never saw something beautiful than this nature park. You can feel that those people have so much love for the animals and they try to give them the love which they never had.

All I can say is: PLEASE never spend money on such terrible elephant shows or rides. If every year hundreds of people do that, it will never have an end. But unfortunately, there are still so many people who don´t really care. I know that for many people in Thailand or other Asian countries, elephants are their income. But I don´t think it is okay to treat them like garbage. They are human beings and they deserve a good life.
No animal on earth deserves it to go through such a hard time already as a baby.

I can really recommend visiting such nature parks. We had a super amazing day. At the same time, we were very sad because we saw so many sick animals. But for us, it was good to see that they are finally free and they can enjoy the rest of their lives at a peaceful place.
I rather pay five times more to go to such a place and I know they have a great life instead of paying 10 $ for an elephant ride or show and I know that in that time I ride the elephant, he/she will have a very hard time.
This is a very hard and emotional topic but I think it is very important to talk about it.

I hope you guys like my story and I would be happy about comments, likes or any feedback.
Thank you so much for reading :-)