An elephant can urinate 42 gallons of urine over a 20 second period. This seems like it would be an impressive thing to witness. However, it's not nearly as exciting when you are standing in four inches of stagnant water directly next to the elephant. The water temperature quickly rose by at least 20 degrees.
Just when our uncomfortable laughter eased, the same elephant decided to poop. An elephant eats 300-450 pounds of fruit & vegetables each day, and judging by what we saw, our elephant had a big breakfast! The warm urine caused the huge dump to disseminate throughout the whole area. We tried to ignore the fact that we were wading though large amounts of urine and poop and pretended that the brown flakes on our feet was simply mud. All Yemi could think was, "I can't believe we paid to experience this."
We were trying to bathe our elephant. Elephants use mud as a natural sunscreen so they are always muddy but really enjoy taking baths. We were each given buckets to pour water on the elephant. It was fun splashing water on the elephant and taking pictures, but it wasn’t what we were expecting after seeing pictures online of elephants rolling in the river with their bathers.
We were spending the day at the Elephant Nature Park 90 minutes outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand. ENP is a sanctuary for elephants rescued from tourism, logging & street begging. It grew from four elephants in 1995 to 35 elephants today, ranging from four months to 77 years old. Jan had been looking forward to this for at least a year. She's fascinated by these gentle and incredibly smart mammals.
Throughout the day our guide took us on nature walks around the 200 acre park to see the families of elephants roaming freely in their natural habitat. We assisted during feeding time, where elephants were given a few baskets of watermelons and bananas each day to supplement their diets. ENP takes superb care of each of the elephants, even peeling the fruits for those with no teeth.
We're so happy we got to support a worthy Thailand charity that is making a difference in the lives of these rescued elephants.
Sounds like a great time.
ReplyDeleteYou guys got some excellent photos. I finally did my blog post about the ENP. Jan, I hope it's ok, but you're in one of the photos I posted. I put on my flip flops so I could go in the river to help bathe our elephant, but after the elimination sequence you described I thought better of it. Unfortunately, I never changed back into my sneakers and left them under the table there. I hope they'll fit someone who needs them.
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