elephants, elephants and more elephants!

We spent the last two days at an elephant sanctuary called the Elephant Nature Park, which is a place that rescues injured and captive elephants and relocates them to their park.  The park has over 250 acres of land and over 100 elephants!  It costs around 1 million Thai Baht to purchase an elephant on top of the costs of running the sanctuary and food for the elephants (each elephant consumes 10% of their body weight each day), so they provide hands-off tours of the park and overnight stays to make money.  The intent is to allow people to observe the elephants in the most humane and non-zoo atmosphere, and to allow the elephants to live the rest of their lives in a safe space.

Since most of the elephants have been rescued, many of them have injuries (broken legs or hips, feet damaged by land mines, missing tails, large and visible tumors, etc.).  A lot of them are quite old and some of their eyes are life-less from years of torture.  However, there's a new generation of elephants that have been born in the park and these little tykes seem to be full of energy, have no memories of chains and torture, and are quite playful.

We spent our 2-days doing walking tours with a very chatty guide named Pealie (pronounced pee-lee), making an elephant cake out of sticky rice bananas and watermelons, and learning quite a lot about the elephants and their stories.  However, our most special elephant encounter didn't happen during any tours... while on one of our many "break times", we walked down to a little dirt path that was right next to a fence and up walked three elephants.  One of the the elephants tried to take Todd home with her (Todd was not feeling accommodating and so he had to pry her trunk off his hand quite a few times), another was a young rascally one that wanted to play but was put in her place a few times by the grown ones, and the 3rd was a sweet lady named Sanur.  She stayed with us for more than 30 minutes smelling our hands, eating berries that Gordy found for her on the ground, and just checking us out.  Sometimes, we'd all just stand there staring at each other and it was like she was reading our hearts and seeing into our souls.  Those 30-minutes were super special and I don't think we'll forget the experience.

After our time at the sanctuary was complete, we moved onto our last hotel stay - the Khum Phaya Resort.  We haven't even been here for a day, but we are all very happy with our choice.  It may be the nicest resort we've ever stayed at!  Our room has a king bed and a twin bed for Gordy, a jacuzzi bath with jets in our bathroom, a lanai with a step into the hotel pool and a delicious buffet breakfast with fresh fruit, an omelette stand, and tons of other choices.