Live Nude Elephants

After getting our fill of white sand and island beach parties in the South of Thailand, we took 24 hours of trains and made it to the North. Now, we have just finished volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai. We were there for a week with twenty other volunteers who had come from around the world to help out. Our daily work included hacking apart bamboo rafts to use the bamboo for building construction at the park, shoveling elephant poop into compost bins, tending elephant wounds, bathing the elephants in a river, hand feeding the elephants, hiking into the mountains with elephants leading the way, and hand harvesting corn stalks with machetes for feed.

We had a moving experience learning about the brutality that elephants suffer in the name of training them for tourist shows and painting exhibitions. The park rescues elephants that have been churned through the tourist and illegal logging industries and gives them a new and peaceful home. The elephants at the park are expected to do nothing more than enjoy themselves on the open fields. In trekking camps throughout Southeast Asia they are expected to perform in circuses and carry tourists through the jungle.

The training for this type of work is torture and leaves the elephant broken and psychologically hollow. Many of the elephants at the park have clear psychological and physical ailments and are in various stages of recovery. If you ever come to Asia, please do not ride an elephant or give out food to begging elephants on the street or buy a painting made by an elephant. These noble and intelligent creatures deserve so much better from us.

It was incredibly rewarding to spend time so close to the elephants and support them as they healed. If you ever come to Thailand, we strongly recommend you spend time at the Nature Park, it is a great way to see the elephants and know that they are being treated respectfully. Book ahead, it gets filled to capacity quite often. If you can't make it, but believe in animal rights, it is a fine place to send to your donation dollars.

From Chiang Mai we are off to sky high zip lines in the tropical forests Northern Laos (the 's' is not pronounced and the country's name rhymes with "how". The 's' was added by French colonialists and stuck. In French the 's' would be silent, but Anglophones read it and pronounce the 's', thus making a prepetual mistake.) We will spend a few days in the tree tops then float south on Mekong river to Luang Prabang and make our way back to Bangkok one way or another after that.

The plan is still to party for New Years in Bangkok and then make our way through Cambodia and Vietnam in the first three weeks of the new year. After that we'll be back in NYC by the 22nd of January.

For now, we wish everyone joyous holidays and please know that we are missing being with close friends and family right now. Enjoy the festivities for us and we'll enjoy Thailand and Laos for you! We'll be seeing you in the cold corner of the world afore long.

Much love,
Jo and Free