Elephant Nature Park (Thailand Part 2)

This was by far my favorite chore (after elephant walk).  It was our first full day at the park, and our first real taste of “we’re not in America anymore”.  They piled our group into the back of a fruit truck, and drove us to a banana tree farm about 20 minutes away.  The small cropping of trees had recently been destroyed in a storm, making the plants unusable for selling, but perfectly acceptable for hungry elephants.  It was our job to cut down any of the banana trees that were damaged and load them onto the truck (trunks and bananas).   We got to the crop of  trees, the farmer showed us how to cut them – ie swing – and then our guide empties of burlap sack of machetes onto the ground and says ‘alright get to work’.  And just like that we all had a machete in hand and started swinging away at all the damaged trees.  I’d never seen a banana tree (or a machete) before, so it was definitely an exciting chore to say the least!

This was the only “chore” that wasn’t actually a “chore”.  The guides walked us around the park and introduced us to all the people friendly elephants*.  It was amazing how they could tell each elephant apart, and knew all of their backstories.

*I say “people friendly” because all the ENP adult elephants are rescued elephants.  Some of them were mistreated so much in their previous lives, its unrealistic to expect them to not lash out at people.  Those elephants were kept in a separate part of the park where thy could live in peace without the fear of constant human interaction.

This is exactly what you think it is – picking up elephant poo.   All the elephants had their own shelter/stable they stayed in at night, so come morning while the elephants were out roaming the park, the volunteers would go through all the stables and shovel up the elephant poo and discarded food, so they could return to a clean pen later that night.  This chore was relatively simple – and because an elephants diet is mostly fruit and straw/grass, the poop really wasn’t that disgusting. (Water buffalo poo on the other hand is gross – stay away from those diarrhea pies!!)

Unlike the cush job of “elephant poo” this chore was objectively the worst.  Like “elephant poo” this job consisted of picking up elephant poop.  The problem however, was that based on the elephant schedules, this chore was only ever done in the afternoon – in the heat of the day, and there was rarely any shade as you went around the park.  Each elephant ‘family’ had their own favorite hangout place, so it was relatively easy to find all the poop scattered across the park.  We scooped it into the back of a small 4 wheeler trailer where it was then taken to the large “poop pit” (aka the water buffalo swimming hole – for that reason you don’t want to pet them).

Several local farmers either donated or sold their leftover crops to ENP for a cheap price. This chore consisted of unloading the food trucks.  The food types varied from bananas, to sugar cane, to pumpkins, to pineapples, and to watermelon.  There were also a group of people who helped wrap little tamarind and rice nutrition packs for the elephants.  My group was assigned with unloading a watermelon truck- I have never seen so many watermelons in my life.  We essentially just formed two assembly lines and tossed the watermelon from person to person until it was in the storage area.  Another day we were tasked with unloading bananas – which was inarguably worse. Unlike the mostly clean watermelons, the banana bunches would occasionally be covered in ants.  And you wouldn’t realize it until you passed the bunch to the next person.  I can’t decide if it was better to be at the front of the line where you were blissfully unaware until it was too late or at the end of the line when you knew the ant covered bundle was coming and had to awkwardly try and grab it anyway and pass it on without slowing anyone down.

After unloading the trucks we were able to grab a few bananas and go out and feed the elephants. Usually they would just eat the banana whole, but every once in a while they would peel it with their trunk, which was really neat to watch. (Pro tip: the browner and riper the banana, the more the elephant will like it!)

The elephant park was located along a small river.   The park would occasionally have volunteers construct a dam out of sand bags, so that the water would be deep enough for the elephants to easily splash and play. It was also a nice break for the volunteers from the heat.

While we were constructing the dam we made it about 2/3 of the way across the river, when two of the baby elephants decided it looked like we were having fun and rushed toward us to “help”.  Now, where there’s a baby elephant, there’s a protective nana elephant nearby.  Because of this we had to get out of the water and essentially just watch as the elephants destroyed our dam one sandbag at a time.  The nana elephant even had the audacity to walk on top of it!  We weren’t really mad, it was very enjoyable to watch the elephant have fun in the water.

ENP was located in a valley, surrounded by farmers of various sorts.  Occasionally the farmers would burn their lands to help reset their soils.  The problem with this, is that they weren’t always completely controlled fires.  To mitigate the risk of fire, ENP had a fire break along the edge of its land which was essentially a 4ft wide dirt path.  For this chore we walked the mountain trail, and raked away any brush or leaves off the trail in hopes of keeping the fire from finding a way across.

This chore consisted of walking around the park to the various tanks, emptying them, scrubbing them and the refilling the tanks with fresh waters.  Most of the tanks had a self filling system so it was very easy. There was however one tank in the center of the park that I’m pretty sure hadn’t been cleaned in months.  The spigot to empty the tank was buried so at first we assumed it didn’t have one, so we were bucketing all the water out by hand. It was basically a swamp in that tank, but we cleaned it anyway! Hopefully the elephants appreciated all our hard work!