Holiday 7

Elephant love, Kuala Gandah Elephant Conservation centre.

Elephants! Real, live, moving-trunked, not-frightened-of-mice elephants!

Our last full day in Malaysia saw us at Kuala Gandah Elephant Conservation centre. It's about an hour and a half out of KL, near Taman Negara National Park. There's a group of people relocating elephants without a native habitat to the National Park; this is their education centre.

We actually saw wild elephants on the drive down to the centre. Well, we saw the backside of one - real, live, wild elephant butt! There's a picture of it, and of the front half, over in the gallery. (We saw more than just the butt on the way back out, you see.)

We watched the elephants frolic in the river, then fed them, then got to ride one briefly... then one took great delight in tossing the houseguest into the river - again, there's pictures in the gallery of a wet houseguest falling off a hephalump.

It was so amazingly cool! I bought T-shirt for a friend back in KL, and Marcus got one for himself, and I spent the rest of the way back bouncing about how I'd gotten real elephant spit on my hands. Their trunks are so soft! And their ears are so leathery!

You can read more about the centre, and make a donation if you want to help out, here.