Elephant Camp

Last weekend I had the amazing experience of going to the Elephant Nature Foundation's elephant sanctuary. I went with two VIA friends, Dave and Thi-Bay. The camp takes in injured or abused elephants and works on reintroducing them to the wild, if possible.

It was a full day trip that started with a 1 1/2 hour drive into the mountains and country-side. On the way, we stopped to load some fruit into a truck to feed the elephants.



When we finally arrived the elephants were hanging out near the feeding platforms because it was almost lunch time. This one has a bandage on it's face from where it was hurt by it's previous owner. Another one was blind and they have several with limps. One is even missing part of a leg from a land mine.






We were able to hand feed the elephants fruit. It was kind of chaotic because they were reaching all over the place with their trunks, trying to grab anything. Their trunks are stronger than you'd think!




Sometimes they'd have fights over who got fed, but the mahouts (trainers) quickly stepped in and with a few yells had them separated.




We gave them baths in the river (sorry, no pictures of that, since I was in the river) which was amazing, and them could just hang out and play with them a little bit.












Then we sat up in a pavilion to hear the founder of the sanctuary speak for a bit. She's an amazing woman and told us about how she would go so far as to steal and elephant if the owner was abusing it and wouldn't sell it to her legally.




Some babies came out to play and get their bathes while we were in the pavilion.


They also had a (mostly) white elephant, which is very rare.