In the jungle, the mighty jungle

Early to rise today, as we had to be on our way early for our trip out to the Elephant Nature Park. As always, a good breakfast to start the day. My friend has museli with yogurt and I had plain yogurt, both coming with mixed fruit. We both had the noodle soup, loaded up with vegetables (this hotel only serves vegetarian and vegan dishes).

Shortly after, our van whisked is up the highway to the nature park, about an hour north of Chiang Mai. Our video we watched on the way up set the backdrop for what many of the elephants endured before being rescued by the nature park.

After we arrived, our guide, Trunk (yes, that was his name), showed us around the various parts of the park.

Then came time to start feeding the elephants. They eat a lot as you might imagine. We mixed up rice balls (sticky rice, hops, bananas, pumpkins, and some other items) to feed them first, then moved on to bunches of bananas and cut watermelon. Then it was time to move onto our Pamper a Pachyderm part of our tour, where we basically fed elephants bananas as we walked with them.

After all that feeding of the elephants, it was time to feed ourselves. Just as the elephants are vegetarians, so were we for lunch, as we were treated to a delicious vegetarian buffet, not to mention, a spectacular view to digest the meal with.

Fully fed, we headed back to the river for the next part of pampering the elephants, the “spa” treatment, or bathing with buckets.

I thought we were done, but our guide had one more activity planned, rafting down the river. The river was fairly calm, but a couple of sections managed to soak us all. This was a fun way to end our time at the park.

Minor plug: Do check out what Elephant Nature Park is doing, as they’ve rescued 77 elephants so far (some from some pretty awful situations).

Nothing like a good dinner to wrap up the day. We ate at the cafe at the hotel, and split a green curry and pumpkin soup. I also had a mango lassi (made with almond milk and yogurt) and my friend had a mango juice (could’ve used some ice).

Tomorrow is our last day in Chiang Mai, and we’re going to check out some of the markets, and try our hand at another night market, hopefully we can replicate our luck from yesterday’s jackpot with the pork.