"Elephants! Elephants! Elephants!", were the chants that the three of us were proclaiming the days leading up to our trip to the Elephant Sanctuary in Chiang Mai, Thailand. One could say that we were just a little excited about this trip. It's hard to research what to do in Chiang Mai and not come across a sanctuary as one of the top things one MUST do on their visit to Chiang Mai. So we knew there must be something awesome about all of this, and who doesn't like Elephants? The answer is horrible, soul-less individuals, that's who. The easy part was done, we knew that no matter what, we would be getting to those Elephants. The hard part was picking a company.

Elephants have had a tough life in Thailand with the use of logging and tourism and not too long ago would you easily be able to find treks where you could ride through the jungle. Unfortunately, many are mistreated and abused in order to "break" them which leads to both long-lasting physical and mental issues. In the last 20 years a new sort of tourism as replaced that in the form of sanctuary tourism. The optimist in me wants to believe that the majority of these companies truly have the animal's best comfort in mind but the pessimist tells me that not all are just in it for the sake of the Elephant.

Ultimately we decided to go with Elephant Nature Park. Elephant Nature Park is one of the oldest and largest of the sanctuaries in the area and in recent years has been enacting new standards to help with the Elephants wellbeing. This means no bathing the Elephants in the river (a popular desire) and walking them around. While this disappointed me at first it didn't take long to see that Elephants probably don't need my help bathing themselves or walking around. I think they can do that just fine on their own. Their longterm goal is also to be releasing them back into the wild.

Within 5 minutes of arrival, they had us feeding the Elephants, they clearly have some idea of what people want. Each group gets a large hamper of a variety of fruits and vegetables. Ours had watermelon and cucumbers. Two Elephants were waiting and hungry for us to start and we all happily obliged.

After we exhausted our supply of food it was time for more groups to get in on the action, and there are a lot of groups. For how large the sanctuary is and how many people come every day to partake in seeing the Elephants it was clear within minutes how well oiled of a machine this place is. They stagger the groups with arrival, feeding and touring the grounds so that while I saw the other people I never felt overwhelmed, but let's be honest, it's more for the Elephants than for me.

Over the next few hours we were given the chance to be walked around where we saw many Elephants enjoying their day, bathing, eating and spending time with friends (yes!) and having the chance to live like themselves.

This gave us the chance to get a bit more up close and understand the rehabilitation process that these animals.

Our Day at the Elephant Nature Park will go down as one of the big highlights from our trip. It was wonderful to hear the stories on how well these animals are doing post abuse and to see first hand the respect that they deserve.

Jonathan