Elephants like to get their back scratched. Sometimes flies will lay eggs in their skin. You can imagine how much that might itch. They will destroy trees in order to get that itch scratched. The trees in the Elephant Nature Park all had protective fences built around them. See the video.
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The Yi Peng Lantern Festival is a unique traditional practice of Chiang Mai inhabitants.
Traditional beliefs say that with the floating of these huge hot air balloons, the troubles of the person launching it also go away.
We also put our prayers for peace into the balloons before we released them.
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The “Elephant Nature Park” near Chiang Mai, Thailand rehabilitates physically and psychologically injured elephants and treats them with the great care and respect they deserve.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with many of the elephants in Thailand.
Here I am having a great time feeding an elephant. I forget the exact amount they eat per day but it was something around twice my body weight. Imagine how much they must poop. Yikes!
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
Bathing the elephants was fun. They seemed to really appreciate it too. You had to be careful of the poop if you were downstream. Here’s the video if you don’t see it above.
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
The baby elephants were so cute! They had to be fed special food. For example, their bananas get pealed for them. Petting them was interesting. Their hair is very course, like a wire brush. At one point, one of the adult elephants made a very loud trumpeting sound that sounded like a warning. We asked what it was all about and learned that the baby had been trying to nurse from the wrong mother. She wasn’t too pleased. Here’s the video.
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
I’m no elephant expert but one thing I learned is that they tend to make family groups which aren’t necessarily their biological family. This elephant had been blinded from mistreatment by it’s previous owner. Her best friend can always be found at her side, or within easy hearing distance, and he helps her to find her way around, keeps her out of trouble, etc. They are so intelligent, and kind. If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
My tolerance for spicy food has probably tripled since I started coming to Thailand. I used to get heartburn when I would eat spicy food. That never happens any more and I have come to LOVE spicy food. I eat it at least once per day, often two or three times per day. While I’m now a super-spicy-stud by American standards, I’m still a little girly-man by Thai standards. My girlfriend’s sister, Nan, made a really spicy dish the other day that I used ultra-tiny portions of to season the other dishes. I didn’t dare eat it by itself!
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
We visited a hill tribe village near Doi Suthep called Doi Pui. They had a lot of handmade clothing, jewelry, art, fabric, and much more for sale.
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One of the clothing shops allowed us to rent some traditional clothing so we could take some fun photos.
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We walked around the village and explored one of the gardens. I don’t think they expected us to stray so far from the shop in the rented clothes.
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The villagers found me extremely entertaining. I don’t know the significance of what I was wearing, but they thought it was hilarious. Our friends Sandy and Tammy from the Bay Area were visiting.
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
Halloween is not a national holiday here, but Thais love to celebrate and any excuse will suffice, so it wasn’t hard to find pockets of people celebrating around the city of Chiang Mai. There are plenty of foreigners (”farang” in Thai) living and traveling here as well. I threw together my chef costume on a whim. It cost about $2 and took me about 5 minutes. I was very popular everywhere we went. Interesting how such a simple costume would get so much attention. I think it was popular because it was outside the box, even though a chef is such an everyday thing. Most people here were dressed in some sort of scary costume, following what they have heard about the Halloween tradition. Dancing like a fool might have drawn a bit of attention to myself as well.
---Ryan Eliason is a professional life and business coach. You are reading his personal blog. Subscribe here. Also, see his professional blog for bite-sized business building tips and lifestyle design strategies. Download your FREE audio seminar and workbook on How To Have The Best Year of Your Business and Your Life.
