We totally lucked out on our elephant adventure. We decided to splurge and spend a day and a night at the elephant park and hands down most interesting part of the trip so far. Do you know the english word for elephant caretaker?
It's mahout. File that away in useless knowledge. These guys basically adopt an elephant and spend every day taking care of them. The elephants only sleep 3 or 4 hours so these guys only sleep that long. They get paid basically nothing but they do it because they love elephants. I liken it a bit to being a ski bum.
These were my two favorite mahouts that we met over the campfire that night. The one on the left is the leader of the mahouts and takes care of the 2 year old elephant. He also lost all of his front teeth in a scooter accident. The one on the right took us to see the sleeping elephants. Both are from Burma. Did you know that elephants sleep with their trunk in their mouth? And that is item number two of useless but interesting knowledge for you. You are welcome!
The most fun/gross part of the day was cleaning our elephant in the pond. I won't go into details, but let's just say the bottom was about a foot of "sludge", and only half of it was dirt. Still an amazing experience though. We walked away from the day saying "did we really just do that?"
Posts
4 comments:
Just wanted to post a note so you know we are reading daily. Love the elephant pictures.
No comment on the outfits??
Standard issue and we'll let you take it from there
I was also going to comment on the matching outfits - but figured you had no choice in the matter. Those baby elephants are so cute!
Post a Comment