Khao Sok Elephant Afternoon: No Riding, Plus Mountain Cooking

You are collected from your hotel at midday. First a welcome drink, then a proper Thai lunch with fruit and unlimited drinks. A fifteen-minute documentary explains what domesticated elephants need and why an elephant that has always been in human hands cannot simply be released. Then you go into their day. You prepare their food and roll vitamin balls by hand. You feed them. You walk with them, because elephants need to move after they eat. You work mud into their skin, go into the river with them to cool down, and watch them stand under a big overhead shower. After the elephants, three things to take home: a Thai herbal inhaler you make yourself, a sheet of paper made from elephant dung, and seed balls you roll and plant in the forest. At four o'clock you drive up to a Thai kitchen hut standing on its own in a valley. You pick what you are going to cook from the garden around it, cook it over fire - rice inside a length of bamboo - and eat what you made as it gets dark. Back at your hotel by 18:30. The elephants are never ridden and never chained.