Another day at the park

December 13, 2011

We are going to be building an earth block sauna with a shower  while we’re here. The slab was being poured (all by hand, one bucket after the other!) today, so we won’t start laying brick until tomorrow at the earliest.

So, since we didn’t have any work to do on the building, we joined a volunteer group who is here for the week…and we collected elephant poo! 

Here are Ian and Isaac, scooping elephant poo. Their poo is quite large, as you can imagine!

It is collected from the fields & pens, and then taken to composting pits. It was more fun than it sounds, but with close to 2- people spearing poo and shoveling it into a trailer, it was pretty crowded. We also helped offload one of the many trucks of squash and banana bunches that arrive daily- yet another fairly large task.

We cleaned out the swimming pool for the moon bear, who had a new ramp built  to hold her 300 pound weight.

There are numerous elephant trekking businesses in Thailand, and just down the road from the Park, there is one such business. They have a pregnant elephant there, and they have asked Lek and some volunteers to take this elephant back to her village (she is from a village where elephants were used for logging) so she can have her baby. A group of volunteers (us included) walked up the road to the trekking village to walk this pregnant elephant back to the Elephant Nature Park, where she will spend a few days resting and being fed before heading out on the 6 day walk to her village. 

Here we are, bringing the elephant back to the Park before her long journey home. 

Volunteers will accompany her. The elephants at the trekking company sure don’t look as healthy as the elephants at the Park (not that I’m an expert, by any means!).

The carrying carts, ropes and straps are quite uncomfortable for elephants, and the weight of the body on top of the back instead of over the legs is quite hard on their back. Note the mahout snoozing on this elephant's back.

We moved a few more earth blocks over to the building site, and then decided to go tubing.

Trailer full of earth blocks, ready for unloading

 At 4pm every day, they bring the elephants down to the river for a drink & to bathe, so we thought we would be smart and go tubing by the elephants right at bath time, and film them as we whizzed by. We donned bathing suits, tubes, and got ready to jump in. I haven’t ever gone tubing before, so it would have been amusing enough even if there hadn’t been elephants involved. In the end, by the time we reached the beach, most of the elephants had already bathed and gone back up to land…but it was so much fun we did it again! It may become a late afternoon daily event- who knows! Ian has a waterproof camera, so he took some video footage and some pics. so I’ll post them as soon as we can get our computers to talk.