This afternoon (by the time you read this) at the National Music for Youth Festival, held at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham - the UK's second city, not the one in Alabammy - a piece specially composed for our almost-one-eyed mystery elephant will be premiered.<< MORE >>

Well, think again, gone are the days of sackcloth and ashes for our graduates; nowadays, should you pass your mahout test, you will receive a fancy decorated mohom from ladies of the the Izara Arts project and Khom Loy Foundation.<< MORE >>

A new treatment available only to guests in the Golden Triangle - never again lose those pesky screws, easily pocket cash from beneath the sofa cushions of the rich, amaze your friends by always knowing North (even on cloudy days).<< MORE >>

NASA has spotted something from space and is awarding around US$800,000 (not much for NASA I know, the price a squeeze of grease on the bolt on the wheel of the Mars lander) "to determine the effects of the explosive expansion of rubber cultivation in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA) on regional water and carbon dynamics." << MORE >>

Last Saturday 8 juvenile orphaned elephants who had been rehabilitated at the elephant transit home at Uda Walawe national park were released back into the wild. << MORE >>

Actually, now you come to mention it, how strangely anatomically aware Flanders and Swann were in their lyricisation of the courting ritual of hippopotami - when you can't sweat and, in the case of hippos at least, don't have large ears to flap there really is nothing quite like mud, glorious mud.<< MORE >>

We read of a couple of eles possibly still hanging out in a small forest in South Africa, pygmy elephants hiding in the central African jungle and down in Borneo - scientists across the world have been poking around in damp dung in mosquito ridden jungles, rushing it back to the labs and sticking it under a microscope (or whatever they do to isolate DNA) and identifying differences between mainland populations - discovering that their project sample is, as they've always suspected, special.<< MORE >>

It was all part of the Directive genius of Palani Mohan who found himself in camp on a mission from the Swiss company that look after Lamyai and Meena, Finass Reisen, through the Four Seasons Tented Camp adoption scheme to take the portraits of their two eles and the wizened, weathered faces of Lung Pat and Lung Lun. << MORE >>

His latest blog, though, showed what I hope may be a change of thought; a move to develop a small scale hydropower plant to run the village directly across the big river from us (who currently buy expensive electricity from Thailand generated by cheap coal from Laos) by drowning the minimum for forest and only producing as much as is needed to run the show. << MORE >>

This June the 4th, to celebrate the birthday of our Founder, we invited our new friends from the local Akha village of Doi Sa Ngo and were treated to a show of Akha traditional dress and a dance to boot - hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.<< MORE >>