The Elephant Village's approach is therefore to buy logging elephants (and hire a few more from families in the region), and give them a job in tourism where they can earn their living with less strenuous work, and fewer working hours per day. When I visited, there were eleven female elephants working in the Elephant Village. They explained that they exclusively work with female elephants. The reason is simple: when the females are in heat, and the males want to mate, it is possible that the female doesn't want to. The resulting disagreement may be carried out in such a way that it might harm tourists that are present at the time. Removing the males from the equation makes the situation safe again.
The elephant lady that I got to ride on was pregnant at the time (don't ask me how she got pregnant when there are no male elephants in the village!) I learned that an elephant pregnancy takes a full 22 months! And here I was, thinking that the nine months it takes humans are quite a long time already...
For the last couple of months of her pregnancy, she won't have to carry tourists around; but during the early stages of her pregnancy she is still expected to work (sound familiar? That's probably because humans made the rules in the Elephant Village.)
The mahouts, or elephant drivers, stay with their elephants throughout their lives and develop a close relationship with them. The strength of this relationship became obvious when the mahout dismounted during our ride to take a few pictures for us: she refused to move forward when the mahout wasn't in sight, and wagged her ears (a sign of contentment) when he reappeared.
After lunch, we got to bathe the elephants. Bathing was quite funny: we put on bathing suits and then rode on the elephant's necks to the river. There, the elephants were told to kneel down and we could work on them with a brush. Apparently the elephants all know a command that tells them to use their trunks to splash water on their backs, and so we all got plenty of water in our faces during the process.
Finally, after saying goodbye to the elephants and mahouts, we took a boat to go to the Tad Sae waterfalls. The waterfalls consisted of a succession of small falls running over rounded rocks, forming small turquoise pools in between.
Unfortunately, the usual afternoon rains set in soon after we arrived, so we didn't really get to swim or enjoy the scenery for a long time. Nevertheless, it was good fun to walk around on the rims of the waterfalls in the time before the rain came.
