Ein Tag in einem Elefanten Schutzgebiet

On 8th September 2018, we celebrated Chiara's birthday in a very special way by visiting an elephant camp just outside of Chiang Mai.

The camp was founded in July 2014 to prevent elephants from being exploited for tourist attractions. Investors often buy elephants from farmers because there are now many machines that can do the work of elephants, making them no longer useful to the farmers.

Furthermore, the camp aims to raise awareness about treating these animals with respect and not riding or tormenting them. The Elephant Jungle Sanctuary has nine different camps, each with six elephants. On this day, we visited three different camps.

The staff explained to us that we should handle the elephants calmly and carefully, and we were not allowed to touch their bellies, tails, and hind legs. With these guidelines, we got to know our first six elephants and fed them with sugarcane and bananas. After a while, we went to the next camp and met the two baby elephants, one is 1 1/2 years old and the other is 2 1/2 years old. After the two babies, we went to meet the oldest elephant in the camp, who is 55 years old.

At the end of the day, the elephants were bathed, first in mud and then we cleaned them in the river. The elephants relaxed and enjoyed being pampered and cleaned. Some of them were completely submerged in water, with only their trunks visible.

After a final farewell/feeding, we returned to the hostel with many new impressions.

The 55-year-old elephant