Elephantine Adventures

The previous week in Hua Hin was very relaxing, so I was more than ready for a more adventurous week, the last one with the organization Greenway. We made our way to Umphang, a beautiful province in the West of Thailand, just at the border to Myanmar. The first part of the journey was in a coach through the night, which was relatively comfy for the standards I had been traveling by. Then, in Mae Sot, we hopped on to yet another truck, what a surprise. I knew it was going to be cold, so I had already had on as many layers as possible, which wasn’t much with my tropically packed suitcase. Luckily, a friend of mine lent me two more sweaters and the drivers handed out sleeping bags to everyone on the truck. The following ride was extremely unpleasant because the street was basically only curves, 1219 to be exact. It isn’t called the ‘death highway’ for nothing… As you can imagine I didn’t get much sleeping done especially since I had to hold on to the bars of the truck to keep myself from slipping off the tiny bench. Nevertheless, when the sun began to rise, we got a small taste of the beautiful landscape looking out the back of the truck. After four hours of this cold, windy and winding journey, we finally arrived at our cute little guesthouse, the “Umphang House”. Thank goodness we were allowed to go straight to bed for a couple of hours, until lunch was served.

In the afternoon we were supposed to have a first meet with the elephants and feed them. For that, we drove to a banana tree plantation, where we chopped down some trees (diameter max. 30cm) with real machetes. How cool! Not that I had any stowed up aggression to let out whilst chopping, but it was very fun. My shorts still carry the stains from the juice of the trees that sprayed everywhere. With one of our trucks fully loaded we drove to a place that got to be our ‘elephant headquarters’ for the next few days. The elephants were already lined up and eagerly awaiting their belated lunch. We cut the trees in to smaller pieces and held those up to the elephants for them to grab with their strong long trunks. Although I had been near elephants before, this felt a lot different. It felt more personal, not at all like a tourist taking advantage of these fascinating creatures. No, this was real, and so was the sticky elephant slobber on my hands.

The following mornings we did the same routine: drive to a banana tree plantation, chop banana trees, feed elephants, watch them eat, eat our own lunch with the gentle giants standing a mere 5 meters from us, repeat. We even got to ride the elephants a couple of times, barebacked!

And it gets better. In order to cleanse our karma, we washed the elephants in the river near our headquarters. What an amazing experience…

The afternoons were just as great as the mornings with the elephants. We hiked through the jungle to a hot spring, visited two breathtaking waterfalls and watched the sun set while enjoying a stunning view from the top of a mountain. Although we did all these great activities, it would have been enough to just drive through the countryside of Umphang to be left speechless...