Impressive skills

It's embarrassing to admit than an elephant can paint better than you can, but I saw two today who definitely can. This one even put the name of the Korean company who were visiting en masse on the picture, which is very impressive indeed. This is Suda, who has a wide variety of pictures which she paints - she chooses which ones to do, apparently (we were speaking to one of the staff afterwards) she does better paintings in the morning shows than the 1pm show, which is the last one they do as it gets too hot after that, but even by that time she can't really be bothered, so might paint a very simple elephant with a flower in its trunk. The other elephant, a younger one, did a very beautiful tree painting, which it initialled, as it is still learning to write - he's only 4 years old and elephant's trunks aren't fully developed until they are 8, so the youngsters don't have such fine motor control as adult elephants. It still looked pretty good to us! Their pictures are sold to fund the Elephant Clinic at the park, which treats all their own (about 60 I think) elephants and the others in the area (around 300) for free, as it is 5-6 hours by truck to the next clinic, which is very traumatic for them.

We had a great time at the elephant park, feeding them lots of bananas (the lady explained it that giving the elephant one banana is like giving a person 1 peanut, being a moolie beggar basically (though realised I don't think I've ever written that word down before, so am not sure how it is spelt) and sugar cane and going for a ride on an elephant and in an ox cart. If you want to see a picture of the actual elephant riding, see my work blog which has one. Once I get home and process my photos, they will go up on Flickr and I will post a link here. We also had a fun dinner, which we cooked ourselves on little table barbecues, very tasty. It reminded me a lot of childhood fondues in Lochranze. Tomorrow is the last day of meetings, it has all gone so quickly! On Saturday I head home to Scotland, where I will have to wear proper shoes, jumpers, and a coat again, which will seem very odd.