Our one week stay here at Elephant Nature Park will finish up today. It has been an amazing experience not only for the boys, but for Mark and myself as well. From eating, sleeping, and working with the elephants, to learning about their behaviours and personalities, to meeting Lek, the founder of the park, and watching her interact with these gentle giants, to working along side other volunteers each day - each moment has built on the other to give us an experience of a lifetime! Our days start early after a fairly comfortable sleep under mosquito nets and fans to the sounds of all the animals waking up (elephants, dogs, geckos, and loudest of all, the cicadas). It is a short walk to the main eating platform where we eat breakfast and watch all the elephants heading out in their herds for the day and then our chores for the elephants begin. We laugh as we've done the full "cycle" of food for the elephants...we've planted corn, cut down corn stalks, stacked them, and shovel led up the corn and elephant poo!! We've washed and cut fruit and hand fed it to the elephants, planted grass, cut banana trees, and made banana balls for medicine for some elephants! It's been fun to bath the elephants in the river each day and watch them take mud baths and scratch against huge trees. We've gone tubing down the river and last night ended our stay with a very traditional northern Thai meal and had kids from the school perform Thai dancing for us. Tomorrow we head back to Chiang Mai for our last night and enjoy the night market before our flight to Koh Samuri and our adventures there and on some of the smaller islands in the Gulf of Thailand.
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