There were about 45-50 weekly volunteers (most staying only one week) and we were split into four groups for working. They rotated tasks so that no one was stuck with the same task every day. We didn't have a lot of direct interaction with the elephants, which I was ok with (elephants are big wild animals and I'm all for them being left alone... they got inundated enough with the day visitors to the park without having the weekly volunteers in their faces as well). The elephants are allowed to roam, more or less, where they want to in the park during the day and then are put in shelters overnight (to prevent them from crossing the river, which borders one side of the park, and eating local farmers' crops). During the day, each elephant is accompanied/followed around by their mahout (trainer). The mahouts are not allowed to use bull hooks on the elephants; instead they rely on the mutual respect between themselves and elephants to get the elephants to do what's required (go to the feeding deck, leave the feeding deck, go to their overnight shelters, etc.)... when that fails, they bribe the elephants with food.
Daily Routine:
It's a bit hard to describe what I did so here's a typical day for a volunteer:
7AM - Breakfast
8-10AM - Morning work, which entailed either cleaning the elephants' shelters (cleaning up poop, urine and un-eaten parts of corn stalks), preparing elephant food (scrubbing pumpkins and watermelons, and preparing mushed banana balls), or cleaning up the park (usually just raking up un-eaten corn stalks and cleaning up poop).
10-11:30AM - Fanning steamed pumpkin (for old elephants who can't chew very well). Because some of the elephants eat around 11AM or 12PM, there was always a mad dash to cool down the pumpkins once they were steamed (hence fanning them with flattened cardboard). This was just for people who were staying for two weeks. Anyone staying only one week gets this as free time and can help feed elephants, which I did once and didn't find overly exciting so I wasn't sad to miss it.
11:30AM - Lunch
12-1:30PM - Free time! I tried to walk a dog or two during this time (helping out at the dog clinic) but it was also prime napping time so more often than not, the dogs lost out. So selfish, I know, but napping was just felt sooo good.
1:30-3-ish PM - Afternoon work, which varied each day but could consist of cutting bamboo leaves, making a garden (digging out old soil and replacing with compost and then planting seeds), cutting up banana trees, collecting rocks to build elephant-deterrent bollards, or clearing up debris from the park. During my second week, we did elephant "enrichment" as well during this time, where we "decorated" their night-time enclosures with hidden food, challenges (food hanging from places or enclosed in boxes) and random toys (tires, branches, etc), which we had to make from whatever we could find lying around the park (which probably made it more human enrichment than elephant enrichment).
3:15-3:45 PM - If the afternoon work was finished in time I would go and walk dogs (especially if I napped at lunch).
3:45-4:15 PM - Bathing the elephants. This consisted of the elephants standing at the edge of the river, munching on fruit, while we threw buckets of water at them. It seemed a bit rude to be throwing buckets of water at them until one day when the water pressure in our showers was nonexistent and I had to have a bucket shower where I threw buckets of water at myself. It's actually quite refreshing. I didn't bathe the elephants every day. It was a popular task so there would be about 10 people washing an elephant and we'd end up accidentally throwing water at each other.
4:15-6 PM - Free time! Generally used for showering because by that time of the day I was sweaty, smelly and more than likely covered in dirt and steamed pumpkin (I really don't know how I got covered in steamed pumpkin just from fanning them but it happened every day. Once I even found some steamed pumpkin behind my ear!).
6 PM - Dinner
6:30 PM-bed time - Free time. Sometimes there were activities planned (like a talk on Thai culture, etc) but mostly we just sat around and chatted. This, for me, usually lasted until about 8:30PM by which point it felt like midnight and I headed off to get ready for bed. I wasn't even one of the earliest to bed - we were all exhausted.
Most days there was also a pumpkin/watermelon/banana truck to help unload at some point (elephants eat a lot).
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| Unloaded bananas |
Accommodations:
We stayed in basic accommodations (3 beds to a room with shared bathrooms... although some people got ensuites). I only had one roommate (so we had an extra bed) and she was supposed to stay for two weeks as well but decided one week was enough so I had the whole room to myself for the second week. The rooms had no glass or screens in the windows and the walls didn't make it all the way up to the roof so it was quite buggy. We had mosquito nets, which was nice and kept the creepy crawlers (small and not-so-small spiders, geckos, cockroaches, moths, ants and beetles to name a few) out of our beds. Bats would fly through our room at night - I like bats so it was really cool to hear them flapping around... especially from the relative safety of my mosquito net.
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| My room! |
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| Spider found in the bathroom |
Our room shared a porch with the room next-door and there was normally at least one dog sleeping on our porch at night. The first night, I got up to pee in the middle of the night and almost tripped over a dog sleeping on our welcome mat. The dog then escorted me to the bathroom (in a different building), waited while I peed, and then escorted me back to my room. I thought it was really sweet and that I had a special bond with the dog... until the next day when I learned that all four of us who shared the porch had gotten up to pee in the middle of the night and all four of us were escorted by the dog.
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| Our always watchful guard dog |
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| Road through the park |
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