Chiang Mai and elephants
This trip was in 2015 and I have a 2025 update about animal tourism: there’s a lot more nuance to what kinds of tourism are exploitative than I understood at the time. Basically, going to an elephant sanctuary like I did isn’t inherently problematic, but interacting with elephants has to be done very carefully. I’m thankful the place I went didn’t offer elephant rides, but even making elephants lay down in the river so I could splash water on them is now considered problematic. Tourists shouldn’t be interacting with wild animals and elephants, even ones used for domestic labor, are wild animals. They are not domesticated like cats and dogs.
However, the trip as a whole was amazing!
Besides the day at the elephant sanctuary, I experienced Thai New Year in Chiang Mai and went to my first cooking school. The water celebrations for New Year were a lot of fun and I loved the cooking class so much that when I went home to Bangladesh I cooked several of the dishes I learned there frequently.
