...and suddenly there's a connection between these Suay speaking ex-elephant catchers and the Tharu speaking fellows in the jungles across the mountains.<< MORE >>

Reading the piece below reawakened my interest in the idea of just what Ecotourism might be and what the world understands it to be - I have long harboured a suspicion that there is a vast difference in understanding between those small scale operators and (in some cases) politicians in the fragile areas of the world that we go to visit and the would-be visitors on the other side of the world (in the bit we damaged some centuries ago).<< MORE >>

however, we're a modern camp, we like our guys to have a taste for foreign languages, to sign contracts and insurance documents and, eventually, slowly, get the hang of these here computer thingies (Tony, Pumpui's weekend (when he's not in school) has just received a lovely laptop computer << MORE >>

It is not often in my quest to bring you all sorts of elephant trivia that I have to warn the squeamish among you to look away now, but, well, if you're squeamish please look away now.<< MORE >>

lucky things not only for being able to watch the incomparable Mr Varun Sharma ride the equally incomparable Yuki << MORE >>

I am often asked whether we treat our mahouts too well? There is a great perception there in the outside world that perhaps we've gone a step or two too far in cosseting our elephant owning friends by not only catering to the every whim of their elephants but by covering enough of their living costs that they are seen to have the same level disposable income that, for instance, a normal hotel employee would have<< MORE >>

Shot entirely in Siam (present-day Thailand), Schoedsack and Cooper's thrilling adventure is clearly the prototype for their later masterpiece KING KONG - and a spellbinding success in its own right. The publicity of the time touted a cast of 500 native hunters, 400 elephants, tigers, leopards, pythons, and other denizens of the wild! Chang is a simple story of one family's survival on their small farm on the edge of the jungle - a way of life that often pits them against forces of nature. The film was nominated (along with Murnau's SUNRISE and Vidor's THE CROWD) for "Artistic Quality of Production" at the first ever Academy Awards. << MORE >>

But we know from a thousand years of anecdotes that eles have a good memory and can hold a grudge as well as a candle. So at times like this when I've got a couple of bags of sunflower seeds in my office which I go out and feed to the eles a handful at a time, how careful do I need to be not to slip an extra handful to the eyelid flashing favourite of today?<< MORE >>

Apparently outrage was caused the other week when a park management somewhere in Africa failed to interfere with nature for the sake of just one beast, spotted in assumed pain on a webcam - though those that caused the outrage got their diagnosis wrong, the animal was not in pain through giving birth in her old age but through constipation bought about by not being able to properly chew food, eventually the animal died having successfully deposited her juvenile calf with the herd.<< MORE >>

...before she appealed to us to come and live here Pumpui's Mum, K. Varunee, was part of the one of the extended families whose elephants were chosen to go to Taronga Zoo in Sydney, being the most photogenic she was chosen to take part in a story culminating in the birth of Luk Chai - the first ele to be born in Sydney from Artificial Insemination.<< MORE >>