Thailand Journal Entry #2

We're sitting on the sky-walk having a discussion about sustainable developments and not poaching elephants for ivory, which I feel is rather unnecessary since we all paid lots and lots of money to come and work at an elephant rescue.
So today I feel useless and weird and I think I have Traveler's Diarrhea. Okay - complaining time over.

I'm at the end of the sky-walk still - the others all left a minute ago. There's an amazing breeze. The river is to one side of me - listening to it is nice. I can see 3 elephants hanging out under the sky-walk farther down and two more getting attention at the rail at the main building. There are mountains surrounding ENP - I keep looking at them and getting the sudden urge to go climb to the top, like just take off right now and climb a fucking mountain.

I have yet to meet Tilly, our "adopted" elephant for the year. I did meet Mae Perm, who is the elephant whose name is over the door to the room I share with Ariana. She was leathery. There are a bunch of rules about how to stand by an elephant - don't stand behind it, don't stand directly in front of it, be careful not to get hit by the trunk or ears, don't stand in between two elephants or you'll get squashed. The rules were for the well-being of the elephants as well as the volunteers and as always, I was the only one who remembered and followed them all and thus, got the least interaction with the elephants and had the least fun. The vet students (pre-vet actually - wow, you're so cool) get to help with procedures on the elephants - I'm green.

I keep wishing Connor was here so we could share all of this - every time I see something that I know he'd love my heart gets a little lonely. For example, he would fucking LOVE all the random cats. They wander all over and into our rooms. When I was waking up this morning, at least 2 cats were screeching at each other on our porch.

We just got back from bathing the elephants - my favorite thing so far. They're bathed daily to prevent insect bites and infections as a result - of course, they go right back to throwing dirt on themselves when they get out.
We all got buckets and waded out into the river around 3 elephants and just started throwing buckets of water on them. Aek mostly threw water at us - we eventually ended up throwing buckets of water and each other and ignoring the elephants.

Elephant babies gestate for almost 2 years - 18 months if it's a girl, 20 if it's a boy.

I'm excited to meet Lek. She seems like the Thai version of Santa Claus.

Right now we're sitting in a room watching a documentary but it's showing a lot of elephant abuse and I can't watch it. I'd rather spend my time helping, which is generally my philosophy when it comes to Facebook posts about animal abuse, too.

Anyway, the elephant bathing felt amazing even though the water was filthy - we literally watched one of the elephants take a dump in the water. Me and the Canadians (Lisa, Alex, Ariana, Sidney) took a group shower afterwards.

I want to draw Lek. Lek means "small" in Thai. She is amazing and like a tiny little sprite who saves giants. I haven't even met her and I already love her. Lek grew up in a hill tribe and was the granddaughter of a shaman - he received an elephant as payment for healing someone and that's the first time an elephant came into Lek's life. She does prayers and rituals at the Buddhist temples to save the jungle. Once a group of monks helped Lek by tying sacred scarves around the trunks of trees, which made it sinful to cut them down. We see a lot of orange scarves in passing.

Just now I won a banana bag by knowing that "elephant" in Thai is "sh-yahng."

Lek calls this space "elephant heaven."

Elephants eat as much as 10% of their body weight every day - spending about 18 hours grazing. The skeleton is 16.5% of the elephant's body weight.

Mae Perm - the elephant whose name is over our door - was a malnourished family pet before she was rescued.
Some of the rescued elephants were given methamphetamines to get them to work around the clock - now they're recovering drug addicts.

In Thai, "hello" is "sa wa dee ka." "Ka" is the female ending of the phrase, men use "krop." It's confusing, but you don't use "ka" or "krop" depending on the gender of the person you're talking to, you use "ka" or "krop" depending on your own gender.

Here's a picture of Dok Mai from the website.

Earlier when we saw the mom and 5-week-old elephant Dok Mai, another elephant came up and was kind of squawking at the baby and reaching its trunk through the bars. It was strange and cute.

I want to work on Jumbo Express. It's where Lek and friends go rafting or driving to out-of-the-way places to give free veterinary care to working elephants. They also vaccinate village dogs for rabies and show the mahouts how to care for the elephants.

Damn, I want to climb that mountain. This movie is fucking sad. I want to climb a mountain to elephant heaven.