Playing with Elephants

We had a fun interaction with a family of three female elephants at a family elephant sanctuary south to Chiang Mai. We were the only visitors to the sanctuary in the morning and were pampered by the tour guide and had unlimited time to interact with the elephants - feeding and walking to woods.

The three elephants 

The sanctuary has three related elephants, all female, grandma, mama and daughter. The elephants are Asian elephants, which typically don't have tusks, only some male Asian elephants have tusks. The young female elephant has a pair of small tusks, called tushes. As it get older, her mouth becomes bigger, and the tushes may not be visible later.

The sanctuary is located on the slope of a mountain, and close to a creek.

The tour guide, also the owner of the sanctuary, is a young Kirin people ( a minority in Thailand), who speaks English pretty well, and has a temporary volunteer helper Dave from United States.

He is very knowledgeable about the elephants. He told us how to tell an elephants age.

Younger elephants have more hairs on their heads than old elephant. They don't have the spots on their ears - as elephants age, the color of their ears edge turn to light color, leaving speckles or spots on the edge of the ears, as we can see from the first photo of the three elephants. The one in the front is the youngest elephant - it still has quite some hairs on her head, and not speckles on the years. The second elephant is the oldest, grandma, it has the most spots on its ears. 

Another interesting fact is that elephants have holes between mouth and ears. They are glands for emitting hormone. They are more visible in mating season, especially for male elephant - the discharge is called "musth". Looking carefully, we see two domes on these elephants' heads - that is a characteristic of Asian elephants. African elephants have one one dome, so do Sapiens.

The elephants are vegetarians - they eat plants, trees, grasses, ... corn stalks are nice food to them, and corns are gourmet food. When we visited they were fed with corn stalks. 

We were given bags of corns to feed the elephants, and the elephants could never get enough of them. They eat over 200kg of food per day!

feeding corns to the elephants with tour guides Show and Dave looked on 

These elephants are gentle giants, but we were reminded not stand behind them. 

One interesting observation, elephants are slow, but can locate a corn using their long nose wherever we place it, as long as we are patient to wait for them to locate it.

Another interesting observation is that we could not tell the difference in size by looking at the elephants separately until they stand side by side. Their two domes on the head are also more obvious if we look at it from the front.

After over an hour feeding, and chatting with tour guides, we walked in the woods with the elephants.

The elephants were led by their keepers, each elephant has one keeper, called Mahout. The mahouts basically use food, corn stalks in this case, to coax them away from the shelter, and into the woods. Once they were into the woods, I could safely walk by them, or in front of them.

The last activity was bathing with elephants in the creek. It was a lot of fun - washing elephant and elephant spraying water at us, I also got a few elephant kisses!  We stayed in the creek for 15 minutes before heading back to the shelter. As soon as they got back to the shelter area, the freshly showered elephants started to spray dirt onto their bodys!

No elephant ride, but no line to wait, more intimate time with the elephants, we had a great time at this family elephant sanctuary.

giving elephant a bath

people were bathing downstream!

A kiss from the baby elephant

Spray dirt on themselves right after shower

Notes 

The last time we visited Phuket, Thailand, we did not got a chance to visit elephant sanctuary because we did not know that we needed to make appointment/reservation ahead of time.