Mahout Elephant Experience

We certainly can pack a lot in to a vacation day. Our love of Thai food brought the resort's chef to our breakfast table this morning to meet us. Since the huge Thai Mazda group obviously stayed overnight and was having breakfast, there were more Thai selections than usual. CJ had an all-Thai breakfast.

Passion Fruit Jam

A water buffalo happened on the way to our Mahout learning experience.

Anantara has complex arrangements related to the elephants. Each mahout owns his own elephant. In 2003 the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation established a traditional mahout village that works to perform street rescues, provide employment and a comfortable lifestyle for our elephants and their entire mahout families, and to participate in bigger picture projects. It now support more than 25 elephants and 60 people, and is funded by Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas and guest donations. Student volunteers abound.  We've met five from the US, one from Canada, and two from Thailand. Our learning class was conducted by a volunteer from another US organization, "think ELEPHANTS".

While we were hanging on for dear life, these pictures are compliments of two of those volunteers.

 

 

 

 

In the afternoon we visited 15-month old baby Suki, all 800 pounds of her.

Feeding Time

And if that wasn't enough, we had a 1600 spa appoint for a 90-minute massage as part of the package.

Making it to our last dinner was a chore but well worth it.  Chef stopped by again and showered Carol with recipes. Staff stopped by.  And finally the staff let us launch a traditional Thai lantern which we watched ascend until it looked like a star.