We got to the Elephant Village at 2.05pm, 25 minutes before the show started. We paid for 1,200 baht for 2 of us for the show. Once we got in, we saw some foreigners were waiting. Only 2 Thais there, the lady who came with a foreigner guy and I. We bought 2 bundles of bananas for 200 baht to feed the elephants.
The speaker was a Thai guy and he did it well on the explanation about the elephants. I can't remember it all but there are 29 elephants at the village and only 2 of them are male.
He said the village is the first place that gives help to elephants and they get supported by the government. Most of the elephants were retired from working for the companies. There is a law in Thailand that doesn't allow people to use elephants to work anymore.
Male elephants are different from female ones. Male elephants have tusk while female don't. The companies that want to use elephants for their work would rather have female than male elephants. Male elephants will turn violent and can't do any work when they are in heat which takes 3 months long and they could be in heat twice for a year. That means they can work for them only for 6 months! For female elephants, it takes them 7 days for a period. They could have it every month but after it's over, they can get back to work.
Each of the elephants eats for 20kg a day and they need a lot of water to cool their bodies down. They like bathing in the water and cover themselves with cool mud. Do you know that they can swim for 6 hours without resting?!
Elephants can be trained and they are as smart as 6 years old kid. It takes like 6 months to a year for them to learn the basic commands like kneel down for the mahout to be able to climb up on them. They showed us during the show that an elephant knelt down for her mahout to climb on her and she also grabbed her mahout's sandals that he forgot it on the ground and handed them to him! Smart yeah?
You will be very close to the elephants there. They will be standing right in front of you. You can take pictures of them or touch them as much as you like. I fed them some bananas and they took it right from my hand.
I don't remember how long an elephant could live for a lifetime but it's so long that most of them have 2-3 generations of mahouts for their lifetime. And when they train a person to be a mahout, they will do it when that person is very young like a 6 years old kid. And then the speaker said a 6 years old kid can climb up on the elephants very easily and then he invited me who was the tiniest lady among the audiences to demonstrate how to climb up on the elephant! I was like "what?!"
I followed him to an elephant. She knelt down for me to climb up on her. My legs are short so a guy there had to help and push me up. And wow, I was on the elephant's neck now!. And they let me ride the elephant for a bit. Every audiences did the same. They let all of you try riding the elephants. But no worry! There will be a mahout with you up there! I was the first one who rode the elephant and my boyfriend was taking my pictures. When I got off, he was the last one that was climbing up on the elephant and it was my turn to take pictures of him!
I still had a bundle of bananas left. We had it on the seat next to us. Then the speaker let an elephant walk in and she ate all the bananas the audiences had on the seats. She chose only the yellow bananas because the taste was better than the green ones. The bundle we had had 2 bunches of bananas. My boyfriend moved it to the the seat behind us after he saw her ate all of the other audience's bananas. But her trunk was long enough to get our bananas and she put the whole bundle in her mouth! All our bananas were gone!! What a greedy girl!
There was an elephant that was retired from a circus. She was very tall and always bowed her head like she wanted to say thank you. She could use her trunk as her fingers very well. The speaker said she could grab a thin paper on the ground. I put a 20 baht banknote on the ground and she could grab it! The speaker also tried putting a tiny coin on the ground and she also could grab it! He said she also understood the numbers. He told a lady to pick up a number she liked and she picked #5. Then the speaker laid 10 bananas on the ground and told the lady to order the elephant to eat 5 bananas. We started to count and she began eating the bananas one by one and after she ate the 5th bananas she stopped! Wow 5 bananas were eaten and 5 of them were left on the ground! The speaker also said she could use her trunk as her fingers very well and once she unchained herself using her trunk and ran to a banana garden near the village. She ate all the bananas and destroyed the garden, caused the mahout to pay for the owner of the garden for 5,000 baht!
They also showed us how to catch an elephant in the past and how we used them in the battle fields as we can hear from the history of Thailand.
At the end of the show, they let us do a mini elephant trekking. We gave the mahout for 200 baht as a tip. He said the money he got from the tourists would be spent on the food for his elephant.
It was a great memory there. If you would like to be close to the elephants, I recommend you here.
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