'fants - big and small

Namaste.
My three year old granddaughter loves elephants ('fants) so this blog page is especially for her.
I recently went to Chitwan National Park with my son and grandson who have been visiting Nepal. Here there are lots of working elephants as they are used to patrol the park and also earn income by giving tourists rides.

We saw some being taken down to the river for a bath - which they obviously loved, rolling around and spraying water.  One mahout had to get cross, as his elephant didn't want to get out!

We visited the elephant breeding centre and saw
lots of young elephants, the youngest being only one month old. He was lovely - so small that he was able to walk under his mothers belly.  We saw him play with some of the slightly bigger elephants, but he didn't go far from his mother.

One of the slightly older elephants, about 3 years old, kept moving the barrier, climbing over and running off to try and find his mother.  She was working nearby carrying sacks of elephant food to the shed to be stored.

Another female elephant carrying sacks had her baby trotting along beside her as she walked back and forth.

The next day we had a ride on an elephant into the jungle, which was great as we were able to see wildlife that would have run away if we had been on foot.  There were steps for us to climb so we could just step onto the elephants back and sit down, but the mahouts were able to climb up the elephants trunks, holding on to their ears.  Then they sat just behind the elephant's head and steered by moving their knees and feet against its neck.  The ride was interesting with a swaying motion, but we felt quite safe.

After our ride we were able to feed bananas to the elephant. We noticed that she hid some of them in her trunk, rather than eat them all at once! What lovely creatures!

More bananas please!

This elephant liked her spotty trunk rubbed!