Thailand's Top Tours. #1

When you return from your travels people always ask 'how was it?' 'tell me everything,' 'what was the best bit?' and it's easy to be lost for what to say. How can you put into words the things you saw and did? How can you choose the best experience when it was just the feeling of escape that triumphed all? Well, to make a start of compiled a list of the best things i did in Thailand, expelling a few myths about what make it so famous and recommending some particular companies that i believe were head and shoulders above the rest.

Elephant whispering: Baan Chang Elephant Park

Seeing, riding, feeding and bathing elephants is probably the most popular excursion in Asia and can be a spectacular experience. However, many (probably most) elephant 'sanctuaries' can actually leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth; worrying about the health and well-being of the animals and guilty for helping to finance this. I met many travellers who had bad experiences with companies and it seemed the norm rather than the exception (in the words of Gigi from He's Just Not That Into You). One girl i met had apparently been chased down a river by a wild elephant as her non-english-speaking guide tried to face it off. As a result i researched long and hard to find a great place to go and ended up at Baan Chang Elephant Park in Chang Mai, which had excellent write ups from TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet.

I booked the excursion online with only 48 hours notice but the company emailed me back quickly and they arranged to pick me and my friend up from our hotel for the trip. There was a group of 7 of us on the day, and we promptly changed into our gear and covered our cameras in waterproofs when we got there. The staff were really friendly and informative about the origins and nature of the elephants and firm about the fact that they were rescued and we had to be careful around the ones who had obviously been traumatised. I felt totally at ease that the staff had the elephants best interests at heart and that this was a genuine sanctuary.

When i was in India our tour guide arranged for us to drop by where the elephants are kept at one of the sites where they provide rides, but seeing them painted and needing to be supervised just to be near them wasn't the best experience. Here we got to feed them as they all hung out in an outdoor area; there were several staff cluttered around cleaning them and checking we were all being sensible (i.e. not sticking our hands in the elephants mouths). Yes they were chained but they explained that this was because elephants naturally fight.

After this we had some instruction from the mahouts about how to ride and instruct the elephants. A mahout is described as 'a person who rides an elephant' online, but there they were described as the elephant's best friend. When one sat atop his mate and dropped his sandal the elephant casually picked it up and slotted it back onto his foot. Immense. Certain words shouted with enough conviction got the elephant to sit down so we could sit on it, turn left and right, move off and stop. Each word came with a gesture, squeezing your thighs or touching their ears, but none of them could hurt the animals even if you did so too hard. The best feeling is riding atop an elephant, nervous as anything and higher up than you thought, shouting out a word and feeling the elephant stop in its tracks- reacting to your instruction. Surreal. 

The excursion comes with lunch and drinks, and some cute hammocks to rest in, which came next, and then we got to put our new found tricks into practice and rode the elephants bareback through the jungle. Scary, incredible and once in a lifetime. We washed them in the river at the end, used their showers and jumped back in the vans to head back to the hotel.

If you've never seen an elephant before it's easy to take the first opportunity in Thailand and not do enough research around the company. Seeing them in the flesh can be breathtaking, but its worth not ruining it with questions in the back of your head. Do the animals get hurt? Shouldn't they be in the wild? Baan Chang answers all of these and makes this experience more authentic and magical. I worried that no sanctuary would truly care about the animals, given the fact that the animals have been used for economic benefit for so many years, so seeing the amazing relationship that the staff had with them was unexpected and incredible. Definitely Top Tour #1.