You have 0 items in your cart
My very first solo holiday adventure was a month long stay at an elephant refuge centre in Thailand. Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand saves all types of animals, from gibbons to bears, but I only worked with the resident elephants. They were a bunch of lovely, retired old ladies and one young male who’d been rescued from sad stories of abuse and exploitation in the service industry. I am now obligated to tell anyone wanting to visit Thailand, beautiful and amazing country that it is, to please avoid taking elephant treks or snapping pictures with captive wild animals on the streets of Bangkok. I won’t go into the gory details, but trust me when I say there are no happy stories behind any of the elephants used for those treks.
I learned about their suffering during my time in Thailand, much to my shock and horror. If I’d just visited the country as a tourist, I may have taken an elephant trek with no idea as to what I was paying for. As it was, I was lucky. The centre taught me differently, and so did the elephants I helped look after there. WFFT is an amazing place that provides a happy and comfortable retirement for those broken and battered old ladies, and I had the time of my life showering them, feeding them and even raking up their poo.
It was an incredible experience. Volunteers have to muck right in, leading the elephants on walks, scattering food around their enclosures and scrubbing off a day’s worth of mud during the elephant’s shower time. Because boy do those magnificent creatures love throwing mud over themselves. Most of the time, I ended up soaked, filthy and affectionately exasperated after a long day’s work. I highly recommend it for an adventurous, hilarious and brilliant ‘holiday’ (using the word loosely). They have many more elephants now, including a baby who’ll never know the hardship and pain of being trained for the tourist industry.
Staying there for four weeks meant I was immersed in the culture of Thailand. There was a village down the road and volunteers built up a rapport with the mahouts, so every day I ate proper Thai food, talked to Thai people and lived in the heart of Thailand. I’ve done the travelling holiday, where I wandered around Belgium and stayed at various places for a few days at a time. But if you really want to experience another country, bury yourself in its differences, richness and idiosyncrasies, then I recommend volunteering at a place like WFFT. There’s the travelling adventure of hopping from place to place a week at a time, then there’s the travelling experience of knowing another place in the same way that you know your own.
