The Big Adventure! Written by Katie

 

 

On Sunday night I dream about the next day. When I wake up I’m overly excited, I’m going to be an elephant keeper for one day! The van has arrived my adventure is about to begin!

As we approach the area I see cute baby elephants and their mums. We’re allowed to go up close to them. They’re rather hairy which makes them a bit spiky. I put my hand near the baby’s trunk and it wrapped it around my arm! I got to feed the mum long grass, That was fun!

 

We’re split up into groups. When we arrive we get given an elephant each, Mum and I share one, it was huge!  We had a bull elephant (male) about 3 metres tall and 19 years old, his name was Boon Cheng.  Our first activity was to feed him. We had to say bon which meant I’ve got food or open your mouth. I feed the food through the humongous trunk, it did a  tiny  spit back at me but I didn’t mind. We feed them mouse size bananas and sugar canes.

 

The helper said that elephants sleep on their sides and only sleep for 4-5 hours. We got to brush all the dusty dirt with brushes when they were lying down. Since I couldn’t reach the top the helper lifted me up on top of the Boon Cheng. It was a bit scary at first but then I got use to it. When we finished dusting the top the helper helped me down. Now it was time to wash them in the river

 

We walked our elephants down, we said ma which meant come here. When we had gradually made it down we lead our elephant into the water. We were handed brushes and buckets. First we chucked water on them using the buckets then scrubbed them down them down with the brushes, after they were nice and sparkling cleaned all of the people went up to the refreshing icy waterfall. After a while in the  icy waterfall it was time to get changed in our dry clothes since we were going to ride them to lunch. YAY!

 

When all the people were ready we were going to get on to our huge elephants. I climbed up the big trunk and sat on top of his head with my legs dangling down his trunk.  When everyone was on their elephant they started to walk gaining more speed by every foot step. The leader said we lean forward uphill and backwards down hill. I personally liked going uphill because  when you go down hill the elephant sort of galloped which was quite scary because I was right up on the ears. We were walking through the jungle uphill and downhill round trees and over fallen branches for about 50 minutes.

Finally we approached our lunch, our helper made our elephant sit down on the dusty ground so we could hop off. For lunch we had a range of scrumptious Asian fruit (rambutans, mangosteen, lycees) and some chicken and pork and sticky rice (both sweet and savoury). For some reason I was quite tired but I did not know why because the elephant was doing all of the work!

After we had enough food we jumped back on the elephants again, we traveled through some more jungle for about 10 minutes. When we arrived out of the jungle we had to say goodbye to Boon Cheng and a big thank you to our helper. We all jumped back into the van and went back to a little area where I had a coke from the gift shop as well as a badge so I can remember my great experience with the elephants.  We also got a cd with photos of our big adventure on it.

When we drove back to our hotel I think about what such awesome day I had!

I describe elephants with these words:

huge!       fast!    kind!   careful!    clever  fun!