Mahouts for a Day
The Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang offers mahout (elephant trainer) courses. Here we see a mixed group of mahout trainees and real Thai mahouts emerging from a bath in a deep pool. This was a very interesting place to visit. The elephants seem better treated here than anywhere else we visited.
We saw elephants painting here, and actually bought one (a painting, that is). It takes six to eight months to teach an elephant to paint a bunch of flowers. The product looks like something a competent five year-old could produce. But because it's a gigantic animal doing the painting, the product seems more magical. We figured nobody would believe us that an elephant did the painting we bought, so we made sure to get a picture.
We'll be auctioning the paining off in the spring of 2008 to help support our daughter, Jariya's, school.