elephants!

Today we boarded a bus at the ship around 1:00pm and went to the Pattaya Elephant Village http://www.elephant-village-pattaya.com/index.html. There we learned about Asian elephants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Elephant. Clouds and light rain kept the upper 90's heat that we have been experiencing at bay and it was quite pleasant. Elephant keeper Phairat Chaiyakham and his staff look after 32 former working elephants who are no longer able to work and who cannot be released because their habitat is rapidly disappearing. Elephants require so much food that many of them are now finding their way into the cities in order to look for something to eat. They can wander into markets and create chaos. Elephant Village shelters these animals and allows close interaction with groups like ours in order to help pay the cost of feeding them.

We were introduced to many of the elephants and fed them bananas, then some of our group bathed with them as you can see in the photo. We were treated to demonstrations of the type of logging work they have done and how they were trained. One of them had worked in a circus, but at about 25 years of age now has cataracts and is retired. Elephants live to be 80 years of age or more and usually die because they no longer have teeth and cannot eat the thousands of pounds of food they need daily to survive. In this sanctuary there are 29 females and 3 males and there are attempts to breed them, with limited success.

We each had the opportunity to ride the elephants with the masters. I did ride one and enjoyed the experience very much. We had several children from the ship in our group and it was great fun to watch them with these magical creatures!

John and I had spent some time in Pattaya on Monday. It is an interesting area with beautiful beaches. There are definitely remnants of the days when the city served as an R&R destination for American troops serving in Asia, although much of that has been cleaned up to make this a more attractive tourist destination. One cannot find the ancient buildings and artifacts that make Bangkok so appealing, but the crowds and traffic of Bangkok are not there either.