Elephant Sanctuary at Kuala Gandah

by Holly

My colleague Ian visited Thailand one weekend and returned with some cool stories of visiting an elephant sanctuary for retired working elephants. He showed me some neat pictures of hanging out with the elephants and said he enjoyed going there.

We didn't make it to Thailand during our time in Malaysia, but I had read that there was an elephant sanctuary about 90 minutes from KL in Kuala Gandah. Buster especially is into animals and was super excited at the prospect of visiting the elephant sanctuary.

I read some reviews on TripAdvisor for the sanctuary, which were mixed. However all the reviews I read for a semi-volunteer experience with a guide named Zali were extremely positive. This is not just a regular tourist type viewing, rather a whole day experience where you go and help the workers a little to do everyday things taking care of the elephants like chopping food, cleaning up poo, and hosing off the animals. Child 2 and Becky didn't think spending all day in the hot jungle shoveling elephant poo sounded completely awesome so they opted out, leaving Child 1, Buster, and myself. I signed us up for a visit with Zali on the same day as an Australian family visiting Malaysia on vacation.

Zali is ex-military and was part of a force tracking down insurgents in the jungle in the 80's. Not long after that, he and a few others founded the elephant sanctuary at Kuala Gandah. He as been working tirelessly for the benefit of it and the elephants of Malaysia since then.

We could have used Grab to get there, but it would have been near impossible to get one back at the end of the day, so we hired a car and driver. Mr. Hadi picked us up in the morning in Cyberjaya. We picked up Zali in KL and continued on a highway through the mountains past Genting Highlands to Kuala Gandah.

Zali knew a good roadside stand near the sanctuary where we stopped for coffee and a little breakfast.

I got a lesson in making Teh Tarik; I spilled some on the table during the lesson.

Child 1 talked with the young daughter of the family running the place and found they had some similar interests and started to become friends.

We continued down to the sanctuary and got to see a very young baby elephant being brought past with its mom.

Next Zali assigned us the task of cutting up a few hundred kilos of watermelons using a pile of rusty machetes. Here is Child 1 getting ready to move watermelons.

He said "Be careful not to cut your fingers off!" and then left us to it.

 We cut up enough watermelon for the public show later where all the visitors could feed the bigger elephants.

The babies needed smaller pieces, so a few buckets were prepared that way.

Zali showed us how to feed the elephants. He was extremely attentive with safety around the animals and was 100% focussed on that whenever we were near them.

Whenever one of the elephants would poo, Zali would yell "Kaka!" and point to it. One of us would then get a shovel, come get the poo and take it to the collection bucket.

The lumps of dung from these baby and young elephants are about the size of an orange, but the bigger animals make bigger poo; maybe grapefruit sized.

Here is a cat that lounges around the baby elephants pen area. The cat was not afraid of elephants in the least. Zali showed me a video of one of the babies (who still weigh probably at least 500 kg) backing up in fear to one of the corners when this cat nonchalantly strutted through the pen. The elephant was clearly unnerved by this bold feline.

The babies got milk several times a day (roughly 2L each feeding). We helped mix the formula and clean the bottles.

Next thing was to spray the elephants down with water. I don't know how much it is necessary to clean them off, but they do enjoy getting hosed down with cool water. They don't sweat from their skin, so they rely on surface cooling from water or evaporation from their mouth and trunks to deal with heat rejection. Elephant skin is surprisingly soft and dry; punctuated with very stiff hairs.

We felt hot during the day of course, being outside in the tropics through mid-day. We had gotten somewhat acclimated to the weather in Malaysia after having been there for 8 months, and it was not too bad if you could stay out of the direct sun. But you can imagine how the extra body mass and lack of skin perspiration for an animal many times bigger than us would be a challenge.

If you notice that last pic has an elephant of one of the babies wearing what looks like a leg cast. This elephant is named Ellie and came to the sanctuary after getting her foot severely injured in a trap. She eventually lost the foot and would have trouble surviving in the wild. Zali led an effort to get a Malaysian company to make her a prosthetic leg. She had just switched up to a bigger size, her second, a few days before we visited.

In the early afternoon, the full size working elephants were brought by their mahoots to the river to take a dip.

 The mahoot can signal the elephant by using bare feet tucked behind the ears, secured with a fabric wrap.

There are several functions served by the sanctuary at Kuala Gandah. The first is to provide a home base for a mobile elephant rescue crew. Sometimes wild elephants come in contact with villages or farms and the people there feel the elephants are causing problems. This becomes a bigger issue as human development continues at a rapid pace across the country and jungle used by the animals as habitat is modified or destroyed. The farmers and villagers are often not often educated about the elephants and view them as a dangerous nuisance. So the default solution is to just kill them.

The government has encouraged an alternate solution, which is to call for an elephant to be relocated to a different area of jungle. In order for this to work though, you need a way to transport a gigantic and potentially dangerous wild animal out of remote areas and across roads and rivers to another place. It turns out the best way to do this is with a group of trained elephants. Maybe you could imagine doing this with heavy equipment or something, but this would be much more likely to injure the wild elephant in question and would require more tree cutting, etc. for access. Using elephants to move an elephant is kind of a genius move since they can almost by definition get access to anywhere a wild elephant may be.

Zali shared some videos with us of elephant rescue operations. They are really impressive. First thing they do is partially sedate the elphant - enough to make it dazed and more docile, but not so much to actually knock it out. They need the elephant to be able to stand and walk. Then trained elephants are brought in on both sides of the target animal to constrain its movement and chains are put on. The wild elephant is led through the jungle with a chain from a trained elephant, surrounded closely by the other trained elephants. Usually the elephant is transported on a flat bed truck, but they don't want to walk up onto a trailer, so in preparation a hole is dug with a ramp such that the trailer can be backed down and be level with the surrounding ground. Once the elephant is positioned on the trailer, it is secured with some straps and chains. Sides are put up on the trailer. The elephant is positioned looking back; apparently this causes the wild elephants less distress while moving. The trained ones can ride in all orientations, and have been conditioned to not panic in other situations like if there is nearby gunfire.

Over 30 years, Zali says this crew of trained men and elephants has been used to rescue over 800 wild elephants and relocate them to other areas of the country. The elephants on the rescue team have to be trained from when they are small, so they bring up the offspring of the rescue crew elephants or injured wild babies to form the next generation of rescue crew workers.

On the human side, the rescue work is dangerous and demanding. The mahouts need a very close bond with their elephant and need to be able to work with them seamlessly. In a perfect world, this crew would be unnecessary and the working elephants would instead be turned back to the wild or just lounge around at the sanctuary if they couldn't live in the wild (e.g. missing a foot, etc.). But if they are going to be called upon to do the rescue work, then need to be trained and have to work as a tool of the humans in charge. Over the course of the rescue team's history, they have had one human death, which Zali said was a tragedy but felt that holding it to just one death was an admirable record.

Many of the reviews on TripAdvisor of the sanctuary decry the fact that the mahouts carry bullhooks. These look a little like a fishing gaffe, but shorter at around half a meter long. They have a steel prong coming out at roughly a right angle, maybe 70-100mm long. While I was there I did not see anyone using the metal part on an elephant, just gently tapping or rubbing the wood handle against different parts of the animal to direct it.

Zali said their primary concern had to be safety of the humans and that the hooks were a necessary evil to further that goal. Usually there is no call to use them, but they are the only thing the humans have to deter an elephant in a situation where they may be hurt by them. Thinking about a human vs. an elephant that way, this small tool doesn't seem like much insurance. He said the only other thing they had seriously discussed was having the humans carry a sidearm. But this would certainly be worse because the minimum use of this tool would be pretty extreme. The use of the hook could at least be modulated to suit the situation, though the hook would not be useful to deter a really determined elephant.

Later on, the mahouts brought the working elephants out to introduce them to the public and let people feed them the watermelon we had cut up earlier.

Another important function of the sanctuary is education and exposure. They view it as an important mission to teach especially Malaysians about these animals and let them spend some time with them to develop interest and sympathy. It is especially important to reach people in this way who come from rural areas; the people who may later encounter elephants in the wild.

After the public showing for the big elephants, we got back to work helping with the afternoon milk and watermelon feeding of the babies.

We fed Napier grass to all the elephants at the pens.

We used the lure of napier grass to get some cute pics with the elephants.

On the way out of town, we stopped again at the roadside stand for drinks and snacks.

Child 1 and I got a lesson on making Roti Jala.

These are net-like crepes ("Roti" means bread and "Jala" is Net) made by drizzling out batter in a swirly pattern onto a hot pan. I heard that the green color comes from pandan leaf but I'm not too sure. We did see many breads and cakes colored green in this way.

Our Roti Jala did not turn out that well. We tended to make a bunch of dots from drips rather than continuous interlocking lines. It was fun to get an impromptu cooking lesson though! We ate the crepes with some curry and they were delicious.

In the morning I had asked if we could get mangosteen locally, since the season was coming in. The stand owners had asked their friends from the surrounding area to pick us some fruits and we ended up going home with 5kg of just picked mangosteen, which was amazing.

Here we are just about to head back to KL. Child 1 was happy to make a friend, and wished we had met her sooner and that she lived closer to us in Cyberjaya.

Driving back, there was a ton of traffic on the highway through the mountains, so we got off and took the old (very windy) road. It was beautiful coming through the highlands at sunset and back down into KL this way.

Wearing Hanbok to visit Gyeoungbokgung palace

by Holly

Last summer when I was in Korea I had heard that you could rent hanbok (traditional korean attire) to wear while touring around the main royal palace in Seoul, Gyeongbokgung. We like costumes and have seen plenty of hanbok in k-dramas, so we were excited to do this while in town.

I had some concerns about cultural appropriation and in general want to be sensitive about giving offense while being a guest in other parts of the world. I didn't research this particular thing too much, but at least the Koreans I have talked to about this activity did not seem to feel there was anything problematic about foreigners dressing up in traditional Korean clothes for a day while touring historic sights.

I think in general Koreans view it as a positive thing for foreigners to be interested in their country and culture. Historically, they have not usually had the luxury of choosing to be isolated and limiting contact with the outside world. Being sandwiched in a perilous part of the world and not as big and powerful as adjacent countries, Korea could not afford to ignore the outside. The outside world (Japan, China, the mongols, Americans, Russians, etc.) frequently demanded interaction whether or not anyone in Korea desired it to be so. In recent history, probably Koreans thought of their country as a smaller player than the giants around it. Maybe this contributes to Koreans feeling a little surprised but open when an outsider takes an interest in learning more about Korea.

In recent years, the worldwide wave of Korean cultural exports has drummed up tremendous interest in the country and culture from whence these products sprung. For instance in Malaysia, I've talked to people who say their teen kids have memorized so many k-pop songs even though they mostly don't know what the lyrics mean. A friend of a friend who grew up with Korean parents in the middle east says when she goes home lately there are tons of people in that country learning Korean and wanting to chat with her to practice. In Malaysia there are Korean stars on billboard ads, imported Korean snack foods at the supermarket, and Korean restaurants all over. In America this is true to a much smaller degree, but all the same I think there is a far higher level of awareness about Korean culture now than there was 10 or 20 years ago. My experience has been that Koreans feel like this is all a bit bizarre, but appreciate the fact that people are interested.

So anyhow, while in Seoul we stayed in an adorable new-build small house executed along the lines of a Hanok, a traditional Korean house.

It was just a short walk from the palace. We made a reservation at the 3355 Hanbok rental shop mainly because it was along our pedestrian route to the palace. We met up with our friends who were staying nearby and walked down to the shop at mid-day.

The two ladies in the shop helped us choose our clothes and get dressed, and we bought add-on hair service for the female members of our party.

I saw a hat that looked like the magistrate's hat in Arang and the Magistrate, so the staff helped me pick an outfit which would go along with that hat. The hat did not fit especially well, but it looked good.

Buster put up some resistance to getting dressed up, but at the end of the day he asked if we could buy his outfit to take home.

Child 1 was especially pleased with her outfit and hairdo.

Child 1 and I went on a guided tour of the palace for about an hour, but the weather was becoming hot even for those of us who have been living near the equator so the littler kids played in a shady grove near the big pond.

One of the coolest things about traditional Korean buildings is the underfloor heating. These builders were putting in radiant heat centuries before westerners even knew it existed! Fires are kept burning by feeding fuel in at small stone chambers in the foundation layer of the building and the exhaust runs under the floors, exiting on the far side of the building through chimneys. I'd love to learn more about how this was actually done; why didn't the smoke come out in the rooms? How often did these flues catch on fire? How was the draft started to keep air moving the right direction? What materials were used to contain and spread the heat in the floor? Below are some very nice masonry exhaust chimneys in the queen's garden which are the outlet for the heating system under the queen's chambers.

The brickwork, masonry, and tile roofing were exquisite all around the palace compound.

After the tour, Child 1 and I went to meet up with the rest of our group. We chilled out at the National Folk Museum for a while on the east side of the palace grounds.

After returning our costumes, we had a delicious dinner at a restaurant around the corner from the rental shop, then the little kids played on the grass on the grounds of a nearby art exhibition institute (which also had a few relocated historic palace buildings).