A day well spent at the Elephant Sanctuary Chiang Mai

Your visit to Chiang Mai wouldn’t be complete without visiting an Elephant Sanctuary. There are many tours operating on a daily basis and we booked ours via Blue Gecko which was nothing short of an amazing and highly recommended experience.

Visiting the Elephant Sanctuary Chiang Mai won’t only satisfy your animal love cravings but will also open your eyes to how these amazing and beautiful creatures live. It saddens me deeply that Elephants are being used in Thailand for tourist entertainment purposes, where people from the western countries pay money to ride elephants in groups. This is an awful practice and I really want to bring to your attention that to Elephants this is a massive torture.

In order to tame them, sanctuary such as the one we visited in Thailand, really helps look after elephants, feeding them, bathing them and most importantly giving them an opportunity to breed. Most of the elephants in the elephant sanctuary we visited are females out of which 2 are pregnant. Female elephants spend 2 years carrying their babies so it takes an awfully long time for them to reproduce. The sanctuary had 2 baby elephants and one of them is a male.

I have learned also that male elephants don’t live in sanctuaries are these animals are extremely dangerous and very likely to kill humans and even other female elephants. They still live in the wilderness and people who work at the sanctuary will let the females find their partner at the breeding time in order to get pregnant.

We also came to realise the elephants don’t stop eating, we saw them poop out massive amounts of bananas. Elephants weight over 2 tonnes and are vegetarian. They love bananas and we used this to bond with them, having spent over an hour feeding them before they can let us closer.

Honestly, I feel like I’m in love with elephants, they are so smart and beautiful. It took me some time to release my fear and come little closer to them but I was so happy when I did. Since they never saw us before but are used to people due to daily group visits to the sanctuary, we all had to wear the same print tops. This helps elephants in the sanctuary to get familiar with you and allow you to bond through feeding. After we fed them, we walked with them to a mud lake where we all smeared mud over the elephants, they were so fun spraying people with water and being super playful. We really enjoyed being barefoot in the mud too.

After the mud bath or shall I say the elephant spa, we walked little further to a river with clear water. This is where we continued our playful activity and washed all the mud off the elephants. They were so cute guys, I was so excited to have done this. We returned home feeling super grateful and filled with love.

I highly recommend you book yourself on one of these tours as it truly was a unforgettable experience. We booked half a day morning tour and had a car pick us up at our AirBnb. We then drove over an hour into the country where elephants live. It was so lovely to see the countryside in the process and even more appreciate the beauty of the world we live in.

The morning tour pick up time was around 6.30am and we were back to the city just before 2 am. The tour also included lunch at the sanctuary and tons of photo opportunities with elephants. The price is around 1900 Thai Baht which translates to 50 sterling and you can find more information Here.

What do you guys think of my photos? Have you ever met an elephant yourself?

Tania xxx