Day 4: All-you-can-Elephant

We started off the day by asking an old lady directions, who couldn’t understand the us and told us the wrong direction, and almost got lost looking for the offices of Elephant Nature Park.

For those who don’t know, Thailand naturally has elephants. And a lot of them have been abused for entertainment purposes. Elephant Nature Park rescues those elephants and let you see them in a natural environment. Shout out to my roommate Jordan who helped me find it.

On the way there we stopped by a 7–11 and got these sushi/seaweed chips. Not bad but not good. 6/10. Onto the elephants.

Elephant nature park is actually not just an elephant sanctuary but also a dog sanctuary. Over 70 elephants and 400 dogs!

We first interacted with the elephants by feeding them lots of fruits. Lots and lots. They are super healthy I guess.

Note that these elephants are NOT caged and they come to you. They’re as free as can be! The railing is there to protect you.

Next we walked around and visited a bunch of families, including a baby elephant!

The highlight of the day was actually when a mahout (trainer) rolled a tire from behind the baby., trying to play with it. The baby was not paying attention at all and got really scared (at a slow moving tire) and decided to just fall on top of it. This alerted the adult elephants and they all came stampeding towards the baby. Scary moment for us squishy humans, an affectionate moment from the elephants.

We also got to pet them! Although they seemed to care way more about the food.

For lunch, we had an all you can eat vegetarian buffet. Most people would think “uhh” and I actually had the same thought.

But trust me when I say it was actually VERY good and after a long morning of elephant-ing around, it hits the spot. 8/10, would elephant vegetarian buffet again.

After lunch, we got to bathe the elephants, which was pretty cool. Elephants didn’t seem to care though.

The park is also home to lots of water buffalo, who just roam around, eat grass, and bathe in elephant poop water (true story).

Once we finished elephanting around, we decided to pay a visit to the night market. Worth every tired second!

Fried mussel balls. 6/10. Kinda tasted like oil and breading with a hint of mussels.

Coconut, sticky rice and an assortment of toppings. Awesome dessert/appetizer! 8/10.

Grilled pork. A really bad cut of pork though, it’s mainly fatty meat. Does have a tasty sauce glaze. 5/10.

Street noodles. 6/10, you could’ve found better noodles in America to be honest. Doesn’t help that it’s also not made fresh.

“chicken poppers”. Super deceiving. You’d think that the lights would keep them warm. Nope, slightly cold. Very bad, mainly breading. 3/10 cause that’s how many I ate.

Mango strawberry smoothie. Cheap ~$1USD makes it a steal. They also use real fruit so its somewhat healthy. They do add sugar. 7/10.

Day 4 has been fun. Onto the next ✌️