It's funny, I very rarely find myself invited to symposia, conferences, marts or meetings.  It seems that every third day one or another member of the hotel management team is 'called away' for a meeting or a workshop from which they return with lots of gossip and - depending on the forum in question - lots more paperwork for us to implement or great ideas like fresh croissants (just had a back-to-basics fresh croissant so I still have the taste in my mouth and butter grease on the keyboard - we have taught our baking staff to remember what they did when this was a French managed hotel, it is now officially worth coming to Anantara just for the fresh morning bakery).

   But I digress, when, in the end of last months flurry of National and International vets' visits I was invited to the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre to a meeting of vets, needless to say I did not protest that I had only once had my hand up an ele's bottom and that it looked like a convenient excuse for me to play taxi driver to our visiting veterinarians, I told my boss I had a really important symposium to attend, packed my jungle boots and jumped in the car.

   A visit to the T.E.C.C. is always a worthwhile thing for an elephant interested body (& Amp has only been there once before for her professional mahout training when she didn't get to go behind the scenes), we stopped in Pang La the Elephant Retirement Sanctuary (all the eles were out in the forest but we did manage to pick up their recipe for herbal pick-me-ups), we talked with K. Prasop about his plans for elephant camps for autistic kids and his plan for an elephant library, we attended a seminar (actually the graduation presentation for the kids who may become next year's Foundation sponsored vets) on Neo-Natal Care and Hand Rearing of Elephants, the Laos vets were in town on a training mission before going back to work with Sebastien & Gilles' Elefantasia projects in Hong Sa and Vientiane - all in all it was a worthwhile day-and-a-half-and-seven-hundred-kilometres.

   But, yes, yes, yes, I know, none of this makes it a worthwhile blog and I have pledged never to share my grindingly boring workings to you, this is not a maths test.

   So, on to the interesting bit, we did, of course, visit some old friends - looking fat (though not as fat) and happy...

 

...Janpen and L. Beng - still in contact over all things spiritual and Northern elephant lore - were guarding the front gate...



...Lawan and Wandi were down at the centre...



...Lawan still not having acknowledged the concept of 'someone-else's-food'.  All the mahouts are doing well, Bounmee is no longer with Lawan and has a promotion to Senior Mahout on a tusker but both were away from the Centre so no chance for a photo.



A blog isn't a blog without a baby elephant photo (see Amp's page for the A.I. baby who we also visited - he was showing no obvious signs of his robot father) this little one was confiscated in the process of being smuggled from Burma, well behaved and friendly but had obviously been through so much that he refuses to suckle and has to be fed his milk soaked in rice.



...and, just to prove that it was not all sugar cane and banana, a photo of me in the important presentation with high powered vets from three range states - Thailand, India and Laos - I was instructed to play dumb and ask the graduating students layman's questions.  In such company, who has to play!?