In the Land of a Million Elephants

One of the big tourist attractions in Luang Prabang is riding elephants. Being the animal lover that I am, there was no way I was going to miss this. We found great Eco-tour company called Elephant Village. About a 40 minute drive out of town they have a little camp with a few cabins and 8 elephants and their "mahouts" (elephant trainers). All of the elephants have been saved from the logging industry where they were severely mistreated (they even give them drugs to make them work harder!). Now they have an easy life with good treatment, plenty of food and the easy job of carrying around tourists for a couple hours a day and hanging out in the jungle the rest of the time. And many of the mahouts also used to work in the logging industry, so now they have better lives as well.

So anyway, we decided to do a one day tour with the elephants. We were picked up from our hotel in the morning and drove the 40 minutes along "Dancing Road" to get to the camp. We had time to walk around the camp and got to see some of the elephants hanging out eating pineapple plants. We rode 2 people + mahout to an elephant, alternating riding in the saddle that holds 2 and on the elephant's neck. Our elephant was the youngest of the 8, a 17 year old girl named Mae. We rode around for about an hour, up and down hills and wading through a shallow river. I couldn't have been happier to be riding the elephant, it was so much fun!

We rode back to the camp to have lunch and pick up more elephants... This was the fun part! This time we rode one person per elephant (with the mahout) without the saddle. I rode on the neck and the mahout rode farther back yelling commands. We ride back down to the river, but this time to a deeper area. The elephants went all the way under water and got completely wet- and got us completely wet, too! We stayed in the water for 30 minutes scrubbing our elephants and getting the nice and clean. It was such a fun experience and you could tell the elephants loved it too. My teenager, Mae, kept splashing her trunk up and down and splashing everyone. It was a great experience that I'll remember forever.

After the river, we took the elephants to where they would stay for the rest of the day in the jungle and we headed to a waterfall to do dome more swimming and relaxing.

All such a great day, my favorite on our trip so far.