Maetaeng Elephant Preserve -- This is a late post from Chiang Mai

Maetaeng Elephant Park is a nature preserve that actively works to protect an endangered species. It runs a preserve, an orphanage, and a breeding program for Asian elephants.


Our guide gave us lots of facts about the elephants as we drove an hour to the north from Chiang Mai to get there, and we picked up on some others as the day went along.

Elephants eat 200 Kg of vegetative matter a day, and drink 100 litres of water a day.

That’s a lot of Elephant poop, no matter how you deal with it. There are people employed to be pooper scoopers on the preserve.

Babies nurse for 2 years. Elephant teats aren’t back where they are on cows, but rather are up between the front legs, like breasts.

Elephants sleep only 4 hours a day, between about 11:00 p.m and 3:00 a.m.

Females become fertile at about 10 years of age, and have 5 to 7 babies during their life. Newborns weigh 60 to 80 Kg.

Elephants are a protected species. There are only about 5000 left in Thailand, most of which are on preserves or in captivity.

Elephants are paired with a Mahout, or trainer, at an early age. The Mahout eats, lives and sleeps with the elephant. For the rest of his life. Elephants live 80 to 100 years.

Elephants are sacred in Thailand. When they die, they are buried.

After seeing what was going on at the preserve, we felt a whole lot better about giving them money to ride an elephant. It gives the beasts a function, and does work to help them in the long run.

The first thing we saw was a new baby, born on January 4, 2010. She was 68 kilograms at birth (150 pounds) and was adorable. She’s in a pen with her mom, who’s about 15 years old, and obviously wasn’t especially enjoying the paparazzi who were flashing pics all around her.

There was another baby, born in October, 2009 and easily twice the size of the newborn, who was a whole lot calmer.

In the compound, babies followed their mothers. If you were riding on a mom, there was a baby following along. As a rule, they didn’t seem afraid of people as they’ve figured out that we have both bananas and sugar cane to give them as treats.

At the end, Larry was walking down to join the group and not paying attention. No surprise there. Anyhow, a few month old baby reached out and wanted to be petted, so he did.

Those trunks, even on babies, are very strong. She wrapped it around his arm like a cobra, much to the enjoyment of the guys with oxcarts who were watching. She figured out he didn’t have anything to eat, though, and let go pretty quickly.

There are a couple of things we noted. First, if you are too big to ride an elephant, it’s time to go on a diet. Americans and Germans were kind of set to the side until the big guys (Elephants that is) came through, and then we were boarded 2 to an elephant.

Our Mahout, who couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16 at most, was a riot and we thoroughly enjoyed him.

At first, it seemed as though our saddle was slipping to Larry’s side. After one bump (Elephants don’t have a particularly smooth gait, incidentally), it seemed as though we were going to go off in the river. A panicked, “Oh, my God!” lead our Mahout to laugh and say, “Oh, my Buddha!!” He did tighten the cinch and seemed a bit worried, though.

Dropping your passengers in the drink from elephantback can’t be good for your tips.

After we’d walked a bit, we pulled into a service station and were told to hop out. He took the saddle, retied it and things felt a great deal better after that. We didn’t seem quite so “tippy”.

This ride was much longer than the earlier one – probably 30 to 45 minutes – and you went through the jungle – OK, through the park – and the river, up and down hills, etc., so you got a bit of a taste of what it would have been like to, say, be with Hannibal when he crossed the Alps with his elephants to invade Rome.

It couldn’t have been all that comfortable, although we did appreciate the fact that the bar under your thigh wasn’t there on this saddle, and there was a safety bar locking us in, just like at Disney.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH . . . .



Before we went on our ride, they put on an elephant show for us, showing a number of tricks that some of them could do. There were demonstrations about moving timber, dancing to music, playing soccer and painting.

Remarkably enough, and if it was a trick we can’t figure out how they did it, one young elephant painted a picture. Not just squiggles on a page like her counterpart did, but a picture readily identifiable as an elephant, standing on green grass and holding a bouquet of red flowers.

It was on par with the artwork of your average 3rd grader, and we were duly impressed.



The other thing that was pretty cool was the one that played soccer, both kicking a stationary ball and one rolled to him, then flipping one with his trunk and “kicking” it mid-air with either a front or back foot.

Yeah, they were tourist tricks, but the cool factor was pretty high.

AFTER THE ELEPHANT RIDE . . .

We were taken via oxcart to the lunch buffet.

Let’s pause a moment to note that shock absorbers are a wonderful invention. Maybe not up there with paper and writing, or penicillin, but wonderful nonetheless.

Oxcart is a tough way to travel. It was undoubtedly an improvement for carrying goods to market, but ever notice how in the pictures in the history books the guy driving the oxcart is walking and not riding?

Turns out, there’s a reason for that. No shocks on the Oxcart.

Our ride was about a mile. That was far enough to get the flavor of the vehicle. We were ready for lunch.

AFTER LUNCH . . .

We went to the Orchid Farm and Butterfly Plantation.

Orchids are pretty, without a doubt. Several hundred of them, growing and many in bloom, in one place is pretty.

It takes about 10 minutes to figure that out, whiz through the greenhouse and go, “Yeah, that’s a lotta orchids, all right.”



Same for the butterflies. The fact that it’s not really “butterfly season” probably didn’t help with this particular stop, since most of what you saw were cocoons hanging there waiting to hatch.

There were some big ones, that’d make you go, “wow”. But watching and waiting for butterflies to hatch is about like watching paint dry. There’s no immediate feedback available.

This was the only place that really, really felt like a tourist trap. There was wayyy more gift shop than orchid / butterfly here.

15 minutes killed it, and we were on our way back to town.