a mixture of white chalk and hidden laughters.: how the elephant got its trunk.

so finally i get to talk about the elephants!

for those of you jakuns have not seen an elephant before, this is how they look like.

so the trip to kuala gandah took about one and an half hours. pretty boring drive there tho. if it was not for the other guys who kept talking, i would have probably fell asleep.

when we arrived, we went to register and looked at some of the informational thinggies they had about elephants and the kind of work they do in that center. among the things on display was a skull of an elephant.

these guys are totally government funded but they do accept donations. their job, to save the elephants whose habitat are destroyed and those elephants that have been disturbing the locals crops. it is good that they are doing this, cuase if they don't, the elephants would probably die or get killed.

the center is actually quite huge. it is just a litle smaller than the country of singapore. just imagine how huge is that!

there were three activities that were planned out for the day.

getting to know the elephants by feeding them.
riding the elephants.
getting dunked into the river by an elephant.

so we fed the elephants!

there was two ways you could feed them,

let them puck the fruits from your hand with their trunk
put it in their mouth

while we were feeding them, i noticed some camera people there. it seemed that they were recording some show. i think its probably one of those travel shows. a show where the host gets paid to travel around and see loads of cool stuff. cool thing was, they were from japan!

so after all that feeding, it was time to ride the elephants.

well i know i said that riding the elephants is kind of a not nice thing to do, but i was kinda forced to do it because the rest of the activities involved riding elephants. so if i didn't ride the elephants, i would be missing much.

so we lined up waiting for our turn to ride the elephant.

well i don't have any pictures of me riding the elephants, so im just gonna put up the pics with wei jin in it.

after all that riding, it was time to get wet.

the line was really long, so we decided to play with the two baby elephants. these elephants were about a meter tall and they were so cool! there was a really hairy one, and a not so hairy one.

they aren't wrestling. they were actually so called hugging...

the funny thing about these elephants is that they only like you if you have munchies for them. if you don't, they won't really bother about you. their trunks are ever hunting for food.

even though they are small,

their asses are huge!

these calves were separated from their herd, so the good people from the center brought them to the center to save them. they are only about a month old.

so after playing around with the calves, we went to line up at the dunking platform.

normally, the calves would join everyone else in the river. but this time, the water level was high and the current strong. so they didn't play in the water. only the bigger elephant was allowed there to dunk us in the water.

when our turn came, we got onto the elephant and was brought to a deeper point of the river. then suddenly the elephant trainer shouted UNO! really loud! then the elephant would tilt to ints side and dunk us all into the water.

swimming in the water was a real tiring thing to do. the current was so strong. swimming upstream would actually make you really really sapped of energy.

after the dunking, we changed our clothes and went home.

so it was another 1 and a half hours ride back home...

this outing was attended by

miriam