I never imagined to be sitting back in my old bedroom by April this year – I wasn’t planning to come back to the UK for at least another year, but 2020 has been a bit unpredictable like that. COVID-19 definitely seemed to escalate quickly in Thailand – I know other places had different experiences, but for us, one minute we were running project as normal, with a few extra precautions and screening measures due to the virus, the next minute we were (temporarily) closing the project due to safety of volunteers and villagers, helping everyone book immediate flights home, packing up base, and leaving Thailand ourselves. This all happened within about 5 days. Obviously I didn’t sleep much during that time, but I’ve finally caught up since being at home.
Anyway, the project is only closed temporarily. As soon as the world gets back to normal – however long it takes – we plan to go back and restart things. I will stay for a bit and train some new staff, then head on to Fiji as planned. It was the right decision to temporarily move out though, I think. Firstly we want to keep the villagers safe, and bringing in a stream of new volunteers from all over the world is not the way to do that. Secondly, airports and borders everywhere were closing, and we did not want our volunteers to get stuck. It is a real shame, and I am already missing the life there, and the elephants. But for now, this is the best option.
I hated leaving in the rushed state we did though. I couldn’t even say any proper goodbyes; I had been in the city so I didn’t want to go near any of the villagers in case I had picked up the virus. My last month with my team – Myles, Chigusa, Tom, Jonny – was robbed, as most of them had contracts ending later this year, and will not be returning now. No farewell parties or Chiang Mai drinks or ‘friendship hikes’ (which is basically where two or more staff members go on an elephant hike together). I can’t complain though, because most people have had to deal with a lot worse situations.
All the volunteers left early, and us staff stayed behind for a few days to pack everything up. I had a lot of work to do over these few days, but they also turned out to be really lovely – just the four of us quietly hanging out at base, playing board games, having a few beers and cooking all the leftover food. It wasn’t how I thought I would be spending my last few days with the team, but there was something lovely about it all the same.
Su and Boh Duh say it’s very quiet now in the village without all of us. I hope they will all be safe. I hope the elephants will be safe too. There are over 70 elephants owned by village families, most of these work in camps near Chiang Mai. Because there is no tourists now, there is no money to keep the elephants there, so most of the elephants and mahouts have had to come back to Huay Pakoot for now. I saw some of them on my run during my last week here. Unfortunately, the forest is very fragmented around the village, and so there isn’t really enough food for all of them – and without the income from tourists coming in, keeping the elephants fed and with adequate space could become a real problem. Trying to brainstorm some ways to help from afar, and the staff from one of the projects near us is also thinking of some ideas. One elephant camp has started up an online ‘date with an elephant’, where tourists pay to spend 30 minutes virtually, with an elephant!
Enough talk about COVID-19. The first couple of months of 2020 passed by nicely, with the bitterly cold season slowly turning into the smoky, dry season around end of February. A new group of interns started at the beginning of the year, and like always, all of us staff combined our long working weeks with short but eventful Chiang Mai weekends. ‘Work hard, play hard’ means that time passes quickly here, and that we are always tired. At the end of January, a group of us went along to Jai Thep festival – an annual 3-day event just outside of the city, with arts, music and dancing, set in beautiful gardens with a stream running through. We only went for one day, but it was definitely enough. With 5 different stages playing live music, and about 14 hours of non stop dancing, our bodies were all broken by the end. It was such a cool festival to experience though, with so much colour and different things going on.
The day after, we returned to the village, exhausted, to find the End of Harvest celebration in full swing. The end of planting and end of harvest geejews are the two biggest village celebrations of the year, full of feasts and drinking. Unfortunately, we were all exhausted after the festival, so it was a quiet celebration for us, but still nice to go and visit some of the families. Since then, as the heat has crept in, things have moved at a slower pace in the village – families spend more time at home, watching the kids, complaining about the heat and the smoky air. The smoke is due to all of Northern Thailand burning the fields after harvest. It lasts at least a couple of months. This is my third hot, smoky season and every year it seems more hot and more smoky!
There are a couple of good things that come along with this season. One, is that the long school holidays start, which means that we can spend afternoons swimming by the river with the kids, as a relief from the heat. We headed down there a couple of weeks ago and after swimming for a half hour or so, we realised that just upstream of us some of the villagers were dissecting a pig and washing its innards in the stream. Lovely! The kids were enjoying throwing bits of meat to the huge fish, watching them come to the surface with gaping wide mouths. Apparently the pig was to celebrate a new house being built.
Another good thing that this season brings is village weddings. During planting and harvest seasons, people are too busy to have these big celebrations, but now is the time for weddings to happen. We’ve attended a few in the last couple of months. They’re always a lot of fun – the whole village gets together for food and drink, it’s a good chance to practice Pakinyaw and get to know different families. The food is always delicious too!
The heat also means we see the elephants enjoying splashing around in the water to cool down. In early March, Lah Lah had a daily morning routine where she would make her way to a little muddy pool every morning, along with Kha Moon and Sadja, and roll around in it covering herself with wet mud, slipping and sliding everywhere! It was so cute to watch. She’s getting so big now, although more well-behaved. The herd didn’t seem too fazed by Khum Suk’s passing – it sounds like she prepared them well, by spending more and more time by herself in the weeks before she passed away.
We had the privilege back in March to watch the reunion of Charlie and Thong Dee’s family. For every elephant family, every 2 years all the family members are walked to the village from wherever they are working, kept in the forest for a couple of weeks to rest, and then brought into the village for a blessing, or geejew. This is a really special event to witness for all the villagers, especially the children who don’t get to see the elephants very often! The elephants are fed fruit and strings are put on their backs, just like the strings that are tied around our wrists to bless us. The villagers believe that the elephants have spirits just the same as we do, which is why geejews are relevant for them as well. It is also very exciting for the elephants to see all their family members together. Thong Dee, the grandma, has an amazing family; several daughters, one of which is Charlie’s mum, and also a few grandchildren. The elephants were all letting out deep and powerful rumbles throughout the event – Su told me that this was because the young elephants were excited to meet their grandmother Thong Dee, who some of them had not met before. She should be proud to have such a big family!
Some staff and volunteers also got to witness them interacting in the forest together in the days after the geejew event, before the elephants returned to their homes near Chiang Mai.
There’s a lot more to write about, so I will do another blog post soon.
Liane's Travel Diary 