[EXCUSE ME, MR. ELEPHANT.]

 Today was one of my favorite days so far in Thailand. We are currently in a town called Chiang Mai, which is another big city in the Northern part of Thailand. We left the hotel early to make it to a Mae Taeng Elephant Camp outside of the city! We had an hour long ride on an elephant named Woonme.

First you buy your elephant bananas and sugar cane. We didn’t buy any from this woman but she was kind enough to let me take her picture. We ended up buying along the ride for cheaper, about 60 cents for a huge bunch of bananas and some sugar cane.

We weren’t really warned about how bumpy the ride was going to be! And our elephant even started to run when a water buffalo growled at him. It was really scary and I asked our mahout (elephant man in Thai) to tell the elephant he was way bigger than the water buffalo hahaha. We stopped along the way to get our elephant some bananas. 

Our mahout, Tuk, has been working with the elephants at this camp for 12 years. During our ride we passed through many small villages along the road and we even rode right by his home. He was a really nice Thai man who spoke a good amount of English. He is feeding Woonme some sugar cane that we bought along the walk! 

These elephants can live to be about 100 years old and they are really well taken care of at this camp! There were elephants of all ages that we went to from babies to 80 years old. We saw a family that was 3 generations. A 1 year old elephant, the mother, and the grandmother. The baby was following around the mother and grandmother, it was really sweet. 

After the ride some of the elephants at the camp before in a show for the visitors! The elephants did things like play soccer, play basketball, paint, dance, and bow. It was so cool to see how they can teach these elephants how to do things like that. After a few tries the ball went in!

After the show we walked over to the other side of the camp where they had water buffalo. They preformed another show which described how they make rice. It starts out with the water buffalo plowing the irrigated field. They then plant the rice seeds and once they start to grow they pick them out and re-plant them spaced further apart. Once the plant is ready it gets picked and then set out to dry.

Once the plant is dry it gets placed into a HUGE bowl so they can separate the grain from the stem. It was very interesting to see all of this done. Next they take the grains and squish them with this foot operated thing that sort of resembles a mortar and pestle. There are a few more steps but I don't want to bore you any longer. The rice ends up looking like this!

Oh & I got to ride a water buffalo! Sawasdee kah!