Maesa Elephant Camp

Sawat Dee Kah! Today we visit the Maesa Elephant Camp, which is a protected sanctuary for elephants who had been used for logging.

As we walk in, we buy bunches of bananas and sugar cane to feed to our new friends, who are of all ages and sizes.

After making friends, we are able to take a ride on the behemouth.

After our ride, the elephants go for bath time. They behave just like children jumping into a pool.

They roll on their backs with their feet in the air, loll from one side to the other and playfully throw water on each other and their mahout.

After bath time, they are all squeaky clean and ready to perform. First a quick game of soccer, and they can drop kick with the best of them. Next they show their old learned skills of piling and pushing huge logs and finally showing their cultural side, they paint.

There is a gift shop at the camp where theysell all types of paper products made from elephant dung. Here I picked up a Mahout hat from bamboo and fans. All proceeds from the gift shop and the price for the provide funds for these elephants and the mahouts that care for them.

Next on the itinerary was the Umbrella Making Center at Bo Sang. Here we saw the different steps in the production process, from taking the pulp from the tree, soaking, pounding, soaking and scooping up the thin paper in a mesh screen and finally drying for the finished paper product. Then to the women who are cutting thin slats of bamboo for the spokes, to the man who make the handles and glues in the spokes. The next step was putting the paper on the frame, and then the painters who had a wide array of designs that they could paint in minutes on the paper and finally to the finish lacquer. Umbrellas were beautiful.

Our last stop of the day is the silk factory. The first step for the making of silk brings us to a woman who has a boiling pot of silk worms, whose cocoons rise to the top of the pot from which she delicately pulls thread by thread out of the pot and on to a tray. Then the silk is washed, dyed and spun onto a spindle where it is used in the looms to make the beautiful Thai silk. The show room has hundreds of bolts of the silk in every color imaginable. I purchased silk shawls, glasses cases, coin purses, toothpick boxes and scrunchies.