The Journey to Freedom (ENP)

We hadn’t intended to visit Thailand during our trip, but after our two weeks volunteering at Cambodia Wildlife Sanctuary, we were invited to spend a week at one of its sister projects in Thailand by the founder of the organisation Lek (yup, that’s THE famous Lek!) as a thank you for producing the video. So we ummed and ahhed about it for all of about 5 minutes and decided that since we hadn’t found any other projects to volunteer for in that time, then we’d tag Thailand on to our epic list of countries, and booked ourselves onto another night bus from Vientiane to Chiang Mai.

After a lovely couple of days in Chiang Mai, mainly moving from café to market to café to bar, via a masseuse or two along the way (Nb. one of these may have led to us making the mutual decision that we should no longer go to the cheapest massage parlour we can find...I’ll leave the rest to your lovely imaginations, but it involved some rather un-lady-like bodily functions on behalf of our masseuses and an incident of a little over-familiarity with my boobs…), we finally found ourselves in a minibus with 6 other smiley faces, on our way to a Karen Hilltribe community about 2 hours North of CM. 

Jess and Mae Boi

Brodie sporting his new forehead protector

Mae Buncy's Mahout keeping a watchful eye

Rice paddies

Here we spent a really interesting week ‘volunteering’ with the Elephant Nature Park’s Journey To Freedom project. The project has 4 elephants-two adult females, a 5 year old baby girl, and a 7-year old adolescent, all who have been rescued from various elephant professions, and are now living out their lives in semi-freedom in the forests surrounding the hilltribe community in which we were staying. I say semi-free as they are free to roam where they like during the day, and forage along the way, as long as they remain in the forest and don’t encroach on farm-land. They each have a Mahout who spends the day with them, guiding them away from the wrong paths if they head in the wrong direction, but the elephants are largely left to their own devises, and just wonder around the forest in their mini herd foraging for food. As with all of the ENP projects, the mahouts do not ride the elephants, and guide them with voice commands instead, which is unlike the traditional method. (If you want to read a little more about the ENP mission towards improving the conditions for captive elephants in Thailand, then have a look at my blog post from The Cambodian Wildlife Sanctuary)

Brodie and Mae Boi (he'd forgotten he had a banana in his bag...Mae Boi hadn't though!)

A green pit viper!! We FINALLY found one!! (This was one of SIX snakes we saw during the week!)

Some pictures from the Church Hall where we held our daily English classes after school

I write ‘volunteering’ in inverted commas as, as we had suspected, this is another of those warm-fuzzy experiences where your actual input is decidedly limited, and I think your money goes much further than your time. But this time Bro and I were under no illusions, so found it less frustrating, and found ourselves relaxing into our time their more readily than we started at the Cambodian Wildlife Sanctuary.

Our duties during the week included going for a walk with the elephants (following them around the jungle for a whole morning!-pretty awesome, but hardly volunteering), helping with the local coffee project (this was actually pretty tough and involved us spending an entire day carrying heavy sacks of soil to and from the nursery), cutting grass to supplement the elephants’ diets and holding after-school English classes for the local school children each day. We also spent a morning teaching basic English at the local Kindergarten (which made me realise why I teach older kids!!) and spent the last night in the main Elephant Nature Park back in Chiang Mai which was an interesting experience.

Some pictures from the Kindergarten

The coffee project is designed to encourage the local people to protect the forest by giving it a commercial value aside from logging. The idea is that coffee plants need no chemicals to grow, will happily grow in shaded areas (like forest floors) and provide a crop that will always be in demand. Therefore the idea is that the Journey To Freedom project will plant the coffee plants throughout the forest, and these will then belong to the local people who will be able to harvest them when ready. Hopefully a win-win situation.

As with all of these things, the company you keep can make or break your experience and we were very lucky to spend our week with 2 wonderfully bubbly German girls, Nadia and Jess, who were laughing their heads off from the minute they stepped onto the minibus (and didn’t let-up all week), Erin, a beautifully friendly and passionate Californian (American travellers are always Californian!!!), Adam, a hilarious Brit from The Isle of White who kept us entertained with his comedic daily descriptions of his most recent night’s dreams, and a couple of larger-than-life Cockneys who only stayed 3 days but kept us more than entertained with their endless energy and enthusiasm, and lessons in Cockney Rhyming Slang. We will definitely be staying in touch with this lovely bunch. 

What the project didn’t provide for in terms of hard work, it made up for in education-Yo our incredibly inspiring Thai Trip Leader is an absolute goldmine of information and has an incredible wisdom that is simply humbling. We found ourselves once again in absolute awe of someone for their sheer passion and motivation for doing good in the world. He sees the world from an incredibly critical but realistic perspective and is visibly pained by what he sees-the greed, the waste, the selfishness, the throw-away culture, the short-sightedness, the lack of respect for the world around us…it’s not nice to hear, and it’s certainly nothing new to us, but it’s something we all should be talking about and should all be doing something about. Like Martin in the Kinabatangan, he knows that the world has too many problems to try to deal with at once, so he is focusing locally on reaching out to as many people as possible through his project, and trying to change attitudes locally. And it’s working: We had endless conversations with this wonderfully inspiring man and all of us, regardless of our previous attitudes and experiences have come away feeling inspired and more motivated to make our individual impact on the Earth a positive one.

Would I recommend the project?..Totally! A relaxing (yes relaxing) week in good company, in a wonderful setting, with some beautiful animals, working for a positive and influential organisation who are striving to make a difference in their tiny corner of the world.

Special thanks to these special people who made the week what it was...Jo, Adam, Jess, Erin, Nadia, Yo, Bro...and of course Mae Boi, Mae Yui, Mae Buncy and Aerowan. You are all gems! 

A toast to our week in the jungle!

I think the caption was "Look Angry!"...hmmmm...