Elephants!

February 9:  Our day trip to a sustainable elephant rescue center....the Elephant Nature Park.  It is a social enterprise non-profit that came with personal recommendations, about an hour north of Chiang Mai in a beautiful valley.  They picked us up in town, gave us an ample vegetarian buffet lunch, and dropped us back at our hotel in the late afternoon.  The place turned out to be more of an SPCA than an environmental model.  It also rescued water buffalo, and even dogs and cats (there were about 300 each of those, many from the Bangkok floods of two years ago).  Our day was mostly about opportunities to be photographed with the elephants.

Chatting with Ten, while the elephants are eating half-pumpkins, chunks of watermelon, bunches of bananas, stalks of sugar cane, etc.

Feeding the elephant a pumpkin.

Yet another photo op.  We were supposed to be bathing the elephants, but really took turns throwing buckets of water on them while they ate.

Ten doubled as a photographer...

Some of the elephants bathed by themselves - without our "help."

The baby is nursing.

At the end of the afternoon, the herd of water buffalo bathed in the river, then trudged on toward a field on the opposite bank.