ELIS 🐘

I still can’t believe my luck being able to see and touch the most fascinating and cutest animals in the whole wide world!

Chiang Mai and the surrounding is known for having huge and many animal parks. One big Tiger one and more than 60 different elephant ones. Sadly close to all of them are cruelty to animals, they are treated so badly. All the tourists wanting to ride elephants or see elephant shows or even to hug a tiger seem to misunderstand that there has to be a reason why these wild animals are defenseless and do all those things (definitely not because they like to do it). It doesn’t matter if it’s drugs, starving or pain, but one of those three is happing. So if you want to see wild animals, but with less harm as possible, inform yourself! In Chiang Mai there are three elephant parks where the elephants are not getting hurt, where is no riding or shows and where the elephants are living far out in the forests. (Just 3 of more than 60!!) That’s what we decided to do, it’s more than three times as expensive as the other parks (we paid 1500Baht, that’s about 40€) and I’m not gonna lie, elephants have to be trained to let people touch themselves. But it’s the first little step for a big change, because if more tourists would pay attention, if more tourists would like to see elephants in their natural habitat and not in shows, than all these other parks would need to change as well!

The elephant lady and her caretaker – In the park we were at there is a small village living with the elephants in the old traditional way.

I can’t get over how GORGEOUS they are!

I know our outfits are the funniest and believe me, we didn’t want to wear them at all! But that’s one thing they were very strict about. Although I tried my best I still believe they think tourists like those kind of stuff – definitely not! 😀