I spent my first five days in Cambodia with the Elephant Valley Project. Without going into great detail, though I highly recommend you check this project out, of course, the project is basically creating a retirement home for working elephants. There are currently nine elephants there ranging in age from mid twenties to early sixties. All nine elephants were forced to do some sort of labor for most of their lives; logging, construction, trekking, poaching, any job requiring heavy lifting.  Aside from the obvious problems with this, elephants are not actually meant to carry more than about 8% of their body weight. So the average female elephant should not hauling more than about 250 pounds. This constant carrying of heavy weights causes rib compaction in the elephants. Several at the project exhibited this. As well, forcing an elephant to work generally requires the use of a bullhook (it nearly makes me cry just typing the word). The bullhook not only hurts the elephant at the time of use; it also has lasting effects such as causing the elephant to be blind in one eye. Two of the project elephants were blind in their right eyes from being hit with a bullhook.

So, I could go on about all of the other health problems including the emotional trauma, but I think you get the idea. These elephants (and ALL elephants forced to work, which is actually a lot of elephants, way in the thousands currently, and I am sure way in the hundred thousands since humans decided to work elephants) had a pretty bad life. Now, they get to live out their lives in a somewhat “normal” fashion as real elephants. Except that they never really learned how to be elephants and so continue to have a mahouts to look after them. (But don’t worry, these mahouts are nice and are supervised by the elephant sanctuary.)

More information to follow, but I know you really want to see some photos and videos, so I will break from the text for w moment:

Day One: first sighting video

Day One: the four girls in heaven get their bath video

*sigh*

I love elephants even more than I did before.

   
     

        

    

Finally. Reached Phnom Penh. 

Got to hotel. (Though I am sure taxi driver ripped me off a bit when he said he had no change. I could have gone into hotel and gotten some, but truly I wasn’t going to ask for any change anyhow. I just wish he wouldn’t have pretended not to have change.)

Anyhow, I took a shower and slept for about seven hours straight. Am now in that weird time of can I be bothered to go look for food at 11:00 at night? Or should I just play dead until morning? Also, I think someone stole my glasses at the Ho Chi Minh airport so I will be forced to wear prescription out at night. Hmmmm. Decisions, decisions. Stay tuned….

Here is where I spent the past seven hours:

  

And this is one of my top Asian features (I thought it was for your feet when I first got to Malaysian):