Excellent Elephant Camp !

On 15th of August, 2011 Department of Tourism from Ministy of Tourism and Sports, Thailand awarded Siam Safari Nature Tours with “Excellent” standard for elephant camps.

Awards were presented in 16 different categories including hotels, kayaking tours, speedboat tours and elephant camps. Awards were also divided into three different levels; Excellent, Good and Average.

Only four elephant camps around Thailand were awarded and only two of them received “Excellent” standard. Siam Safari was proud to accept the “Excellent” standard as the only elephant camp in Southern Thailand.

The award for elephant camps mainly guarantees that elephants are properly looked after; Elephants have proper living areas, their food is nutritious and good quality, that elephants are regularly checked by veterinarians and that the whole camp is sustainably run.

Khun Iyup Tohyanee, Siam Safari’s General Manager who has been involved in running our elephant camp for more than a decade says that even it has been hard work to keep the camp running with high standards it is not new for us to follow certain rules when working with elephants. “In 2003 Siam Safari was awarded Royal Thai Government’s Livestock Department’s standard for elephant camps and we still are the only camp in Southern Thailand with this award. Livestock Department still checks our camp annually, so it was not too difficult for us to meet the requirements for the Department of Tourism’s standard.”

Also checking Mahout’s and other staffs working conditions were part of the standard. Many other, more visible areas for our customers were also inspected for the standard including camp signage, waste management, parking areas, toilets, kitchen and food.

The standard is awarded for 3 years at a time and award winning companies will be inspected again to see if they can keep the standard.

Experience Asian Elephant!

If you have already tried elephant trekking, how about our brand new Elephant Experience?

Often our guests are very interested about our elephant's daily life; what they eat, how they are fed or do they need to be washed?

To let our guests have similar amazing experiences with Asian Elephant that we experience on daily basis we have introduced our new Elephant Experience tour. Main focus is on elephants and spending some quality time with them.

At our Elephant Camp at Chalong Highlands you get hands on with our adult Elephants and prepare one of their daily feeds. Chop fresh fruits and vegetables and make natural vitamin supplements that aid their digestion before feeding them a portion of the 250kgs of food they can eat daily. Learn the secrets of their handlers and how they get on and off. Watch them play in our elephant bath before washing and showering them at the end of the experience.

You also get to visit our local farmyard to see how water buffalo plough rice fields, learn how to harvest and de-husk rice and about the different varieties available. Try a ride on a wooden cart pulled by buffalo before sampling local coffee and experiencing smells of our herb garden.

Currently the tour is run at our Phuket camp on Mondays only and it can be booked directly via our website.

Guide training

The summer is here again, and even though still receiving a fluent flow of guests, we found the time to take our guides for a city tour as a part of their annual guide training. The main idea of the tour was to give our talented guides the personal experience as well as a great deal of information on different cultural attractions to share with our guests. At the same time they could have a day off of their guiding duties and enjoy a day out with their colleagues.

Our first destination was on the top of the Nak-kerd Hill, which is situated in the South of Phuket, between Karon Beach in the west and Chalong bay in the east. On our way to the top, passing our elephant camp we saw glimpses of a huge statue covered by Burmese jade marble; The Big Buddha of Phuket. Though monsoon rains have arrived to the island, we were blessed with amazingly sunny and clear weather guaranteeing unforgettable views over Southern parts of the island.

Our next stop was Phuket Aquarium, situated in the southernmost tip of Panwa Cape where we spent some interesting moments exploring more than 150 different species of marine life, most of them found locally either in the Andaman Sea or the Gulf of Thailand. After the main exhibition we started walking the Nature Trail which took us to see some baby sea turtles, some of them not more than one month old. Close to the huge water tanks they had a special area for older turtles and our guides truly enjoyed watching one of the Olive Ridley Turtles pulling itself slowly forward on the sand.

After a delicious seafood lunch we headed to Kathu, known as the former tin mining center of the island before 1980's. The construction work of Phuket Mining Museum finished already in 2008, but wasn't opened officially until in March 2011. There our guides went through an interesting trail of exhibitions concerning Phuket's past with tin mining as the most important industry. Then it was the time to head to north to the Gibbon Rehabilitation Project situated close to Bang Pae waterfall. Operating since 1992 the objective of this project is to repopulate Phuket's last remaining rainforest area by rehabilitating endangered white-handed gibbons being used as pets or tourist attractions and releasing them to the forest reserve next to the project.

On the way back to Siam Safari office we stopped at the beautiful Wat Prathong temple to take a look and respect the famous half-buried Buddha image. Back in the minivan our guides participated in a quiz with questions about new things they learned during the tour. All of our guides completed the quiz with great results, which tells that the city tour achieved its goal by being both educating and fun day for our staff.