Elephants & Nightlife Phuket - 9 July 2023

We woke up to rain. The hotel actually keeps umbrellas in the rooms. We explored a little before heading to breakfast. This place is so pretty.

After breakfast we walked the beach. I now understand why there are certain beaches for swimming.

This sign was a first for me. Tsunami zones are serious things here since they got hit so bad a few years ago.

We love it here.

Now we get to go play with elephants! We went on the Elephant Sanctuary Tour. We were picked up from the hotel lobby and bused to the sanctuary. The Elephant Jungle Sanctuary is a safe haven for mistreated elephants. Elephant riding is very popular in Thailand, but they are not treated ethically. I was very excited about this because you feed and bathe the elephants.

We arrived and learned about the elephants, what the sanctuary does and how they make paper from elephant poop.

We also made vitamin balls to feed the elephants.

Then we walked to the feeding area. There were 6 elephants and we could feed all of them. It was a little intimidating walking up to them. But they were so sweet and gentle. We began with feeding them bananas then watermelon.

It took a minute to get the hang of feeding them. You have to place it just right so they could grab it with their trunks.

This was an unbelievable experience, very magical. I felt so insignificant next to these giants.

This elephant wouldn't eat the rind of the watermelons.

After all the food was gone, we changed into our bathing suits. If you go, don't worry about running out of food to feed them, there was a ton of it.

As I was washing this elephant, her trunk kept touching me. I think she wanted to hold hands.

Then we rinsed them off.

Then we moved to a bigger water area to scrub the elephants.

This was a little complicated because the elephants would lay down and you couldn't see them. We had to be careful not to step on them.

Once we had finished bathing the elephants, we changed clothes. Jamie was chosen to cook in the cooking demonstration of Pad Thai. We got to it along with a buffet. It was a wonderful day. Everyone was so friendly and fun. Several of the handlers would take our phones and take so many great pictures. Seriously, we had hundreds of pictures from today.

After saying goodbye to a great group, we bussed back to the hotel and got cleaned up. Here is the route we took.

Since I had dragged Jamie to see elephants, she decided to drag me dancing. More accurately I would watch our table and drinks while she danced. We took a tuk tuk to Bangela Road. This is a road, covering a couple blocks that is for pedestrians.

It's hard to explain the experience of walking this road. It's loud, busy, fascinating and people approach you constantly. I just kept saying no thank you and walking. Word of warning, be cautious with kids. Prostitution and sex shows are legal here. There's nothing too obscene as you are walking but people approach you to see the shows.

We wandered until Jamie spotted an Irish pub, The Dublin Irish Pub. We had some food and some drinks. Our servers were so much fun. We spent a long time here. The vibe, music, everything was good. Then we headed to Illuzion. This place was not my scene, but it was packed and loud and Jamie loved it.

I stayed as long as I could but then took a tuk tuk back to the hotel and crashed.