Elephantastic Experience
How close can you get to an elephant? Well, if he is a grown up male, who is having his once a year period of aggravation marked by musth coming out of the sides of his head, you'd better stay away.
He is 4 ton's of anger! But, how do you know when he is on musth? It takes an expert and at Pattaya Elephant Village, they are experts! At the Pattaya Elephant Village, not only can you get close to them in complete safety, you can you even sit on their backs! There is a lot to learn about working elephants and their training. This training used to take 10 years to complete. Both male and female elephants are strong workers, but dominant and large male elephants workers can be hard to handle; they usually accept only one master.
Did you know that they normally have the same master for their whole life, which can be 80 years? That’s dedication to a job! Every day at 14.30 hours, there are demonstrations of how working elephants and their masters lived, worked and much more.This show is not like many other elephant shows, where the elephants do tricks, like standing on one leg or playing football.
This place is dedicated to the working elephant and the way they were used in Thailand in the past and are still being used in the Royal parks today. Another function of the Pattaya Elephant Village is that of a home for sick and injured former working elephants. Due to sickness and injury, these elephants are no longer suitable for heavy work and need a lot of care.
They can still do light work and their health can be maintained with herbs growing in the park. But an elephant is just like a horse, often in need of a vet and sometimes expensive medication. Just feeding an elephant is quite expensive it consumes 200 kilo's of fodder a day! Besides the demonstrations, there are different treks to be enjoyed throughout the day. We did the one hour trek on the back of an elephant.
This trek takes you through some nice countryside and it was great fun for us and the kids. Despite his own weight of 3 to 4 thousand kilo, the elephant majestically plodded along and hardly seemed to notice our weight on his back and that of his master on his head; you feel like a maharaja.A little excitement part way through when one elephant had an itch in a deep stream and started to rub his behind on the bank with two girls and his master on his back. You can have it all on video to relive the experience later.
After the trek we were taken back through similar terrain in a Land Rover. On our way back, we had a visit from a small monkey climbing from kid to kid in the car, bringing a lot of yells from the kids. When we got back to the Elephant Village, there was some excellent fruit prepared for us and we had a first look at the video.
Conclusion a very nice outing, close to Pattaya with lots of fun for kids and adults!
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