Cambodia Wildlife Sanctuary

We specifically planned for Siem Reap in order to volunteer at the Cambodia Wildlife Sanctuary. We spent a ton of time researching the Elephant Nature Park outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand, and were fortunate to stumble upon the Cambodian sister park. I’m not sure we knew the extent of what we were getting ourself into, but it ended up being one of the best experiences of my life.

Day One:
We were picked up from hotel in Siem Reap and boarded a minivan with 7-8 other folks from Australia, the UK, Spain, Canada, and the USA.
Arrival included checking into our cabins. Sure, it is basic, but why not.

Next up, our orientation and lunch. Vegan lunch ended up being something we can absolutely manage for a week. No problem.

Following that, we scooped the elephant poop for the evening placement of the elephants.

Because the sanctuary is actually on a national park (with no exterior fences), the elephants are housed in specific areas at night so they don’t just wander away and get captured by folks who want only to exploit them for labor. The old blind elephant is in an enclosure, while the other three are held by a chain attached around one of their feet to a concrete anchor in the ground. This is all very temporary however. The sanctuary is building a large enclosure for the elephants to be in at night that will not involve them being chained up. They were estimating it being about six weeks from completion.

We then cleaned the duck and geese ponds. Fun story about the ducks and geese: The founder (Lek) spotted these birds in a market, hung up by their feet, being sold as food. The birds were all still alive, so she bought every one of them and brought them to the sanctuary to live out a long healthy life. I remain unsure why they didn’t put drains into the three ponds when they built them. At any rate, we all scooped water while standing in knee deep water mixed with duck poop and insect larvae. Seriously disgusting. We managed to empty all three, scrub them clean, and refill with fresh water. This was the single (only?) grossest and most unpleasant thing we did for the whole week.

We had the fun job of feeding the sweet elephants next. One of the elephants was a sweet older girl who had been horribly abused in the logging industry by her mahout. Because she leaned toward the defiant side from time to time, the mean mahout had blinded her by injecting her eyeballs with saline. His goal was to increase her dependence on him. I never heard if it did or not, but she managed to end up on the sanctuary in her later years to live a happy ending to her life. Because of her age and failing teeth (did you know they only have four teeth at a time?!), her diet is supplemented once per day with soft rice, bananas, and vitamin pellets.

She is the only elephant anyone is allowed to touch. By softly touching her trunk, she knows to curl it up and food will be gently offered for her to grab with the tip of her trunk. I am in love with this beauty.

Two other elephants at the sanctuary are really new. One was very recently rescued and is currently emotionally attached to one of the older elephants that has been living there a while. They consider the older one the nanny to the younger one. Their relationship is very strong as they wander around during the days side by side.

Cleaning up involved a “shower” that was really just a bucket of water and a private stall where you could lather up and then dump some cold water on yourself to rinse. I thought it would be awful until I realized how much it cooled me down from the hot day.

Dinner and blessings by the shaman rounded out our day. Scott was “fortunate” to have the shaman notice him sitting uncomfortably on the floor (in the proper sitting position for greeting a religious leader) and called him to the front in order to bless his knees and legs. The kids almost lost it with giggles. I’m still hoping that blessing starts working.

Evening at the facility also meant power and internet for 3-4 hours. It was a special time that included fans and lights. The basics had suddenly become something to look forward to.

Day Two:
Sleeping is overrated. After a restless night that started hot and ended up cool but with far more bugs than any of us were expecting, we actually welcomed a 6:30am wake up. Vegan breakfast was passable. Who knew rice would be a pretty decent breakfast?

After scooping the poop to prep the evening beds for the gentle giants, we took off on a six hour jungle walk with the elephants, their mahouts, and some heavily armed rangers.

The walk was hot and difficult at times, but walking alongside the elephants and observing them being free to roam never became boring. Keali was so close at one point that she got inbetween an elephant and a prickly bush. The sweet mahout rescued her.

Once we returned to camp, we fed the elephants again, cleaned up, and had another vegan meal. I’m not sure how vegans enjoy that sort of eating. The bigger problem for our very high maintenance group of four is that the ice man didn’t show up. Room temperature water was all there is to drink. (Room temperature is somewhere around 85-90 degrees.)

The second night sleeping arrangements were a little more chaotic. Caden’s mosquito tent somehow ended up with a very large, very angry cicada that screamed as Scott tried to get it out. Success finally, but Caden refused to sleep in his mosquito net. I agreed to switch with him, which lasted about 4-5 hours until all the bugs that got into the tent came alive in the middle of the night. Keali unknowingly shared her twin bed with mosquito net with me until she woke up a few hours later. At this point, we are unsure what we have gotten ourselves into.

Day Three:
Wednesday morning started out with another vegan meal, scooping poop, and then making a bed for the older elephant. Since she is so big and getting old, lifting herself up and down off the ground for sleeping has become difficult. In order to help her, every week, a large pile of sand is moved to give her an incline to lay down and sleep on at night while still being able to get up on her own in the morning.

This task was one I was dreading as it involved wheel barrows, shovels, and too much sand. Our volunteer group though giggled our way through the hour or so of work, making conversation, creating challenges for one another, and generally just cracking up the whole time.

Another vegan lunch followed, and then we were off to the local school to help the kids learn english. It’s important to note that the jungles of Cambodia used to cover about 70% of the land, but now cover less than 3%. The wild elephants have all but disappeared. In creating the sanctuary, the goal was to employ the locals in order to give them a way to make money that didn’t include logging or poaching. As a function of this, the army came in and trained locals to be rangers to help protect from logging, but also to track poachers.

The Sanctuary also employed many locals, and the Sanctuary provides weekly volunteers to go teach english at the local village school for a couple of hours. I would say the school was one of my personal highlights. It was eye opening for my kids to see the conditions of the small village school. Caden loved taking charge and interacting with them, and I was pleased to see Keali warmed up after about 30 minutes. The school itself consisted of two rooms (one for younger kids and one for older) in a single building without electricity or fans or air conditioning, and a dirt floor.

It was easy to see that the expected uniform was a white shirt (or one that at some point started as white) and navy blue skirts or shorts (long enough to cover the knee). There were a few kids whose families clearly couldn’t afford the uniform but were still in attendance and completely accepted by the others. The school (and the wedding reception discussed below) were the easiest places to really appreciate the level of poverty that the locals lived in. It was inspiring and heartbreaking all at the same time. They were warm, respectful, kind, and extremely affectionate. They loved touching Caden and Keali, but they hugged all the volunteers repeatedly. The children were always smiling and full of joy.

We went back to camp, fed the elephants, ate yet another vegan meal, and called it a day.

Day Four:
Thursday morning, after eating what some (rabbits) might call breakfast, but the Hoopers call “near fasting”, we set out to scoop poop again. Next on the list was planting bamboo trees on the river bank to help protect it from erosion. Again, our volunteer group had so much fun completing this task. By the end of it, we had around ten people in a line passing the buckets of water up and down the hill. We made quick work out of the task.

Lunch was, you guessed it, something vegan. The kids seemed to start to shrink at this point. It was amazing how little they were eating yet still functioning.

Afternoon was an outstanding nature walk with the elephants.

The highlight of this one was that at one point, the nanny and baby elephants became separated. One was down in the river, while the other was up near the shelter taking sugar cane from us. They suddenly became aware that their partner wasn’t in sight. They yelled to each other and then took off running, ground shaking, to come together where they happily circled each other and spoke soft reassuring sounds. We were in love all over again.

​​Dinner was something resembling vegetables and rice, but at this point, our family had basically given up on any long term sustenance. Peanut butter had become life now.

Day Five:
Friday morning was vegan something, poop scooping (and giggling), and then we separated into two different groups. Scott and I went to cut sugarcane with machetes out in a field, while Caden and Keali stayed with our new American friends there and planted seeds which would later become trees to aid in the reforestation efforts. The folks at the sanctuary have really figured out how to do so much work with such little funds and little waste.

Rice and something resembling a life of vegan eating that I never want to have was for lunch. After “lunch”, the seed collection started. One of our awesome guides Aek shimmied up a tree in no time and then proceeded to shake the seed buds out.

We all collected the seed pods to open and collect seeds. These seeds were to be replanted by another week of volunteers.

Scott thought it looked too fun to pass up, so he got in on the tree climbing action. I’m just happy there wasn’t a hospital trip.

We did the daily feeding of the elephants, and then were so lucky to be invited to the wedding reception of a couple of locals (also employees of the sanctuary). The reception was incredible.

The bride changed her dress no fewer than five times in the less than two hours we were there. The food was amazing and included the best pork I have ever eaten. (I’m still not sure if it was really that good, or if my body was just screaming for protein.)

The local children hung out of the windows to watch the adults enjoy themselves. Several of the children recognized us from the school and rushed to hug us. It was fun that each child seemed to have a favorite “english teacher” to hug.

I personally loved that the only people working at the reception were men. Passing out beer on each table as it was consumed, moving plates of food to and from tables, and helping guests get seated kept the men busy.

It is interesting to note that evidently the families spend around $3000USD for wedding receptions. This doesn’t seem like much in American standards. However, if you consider the family that paid for this party lives in not much more than a treehouse on stilts, has no running water or electricity, and is in extreme poverty, $3000 seems inconceivable. Perhaps the Cambodians take their marriages more seriously than many Americans so it is a once in a lifetime expense?

Day Six:
Our last full day of basically starving-for-protein started again with some rice and peanut butter and poop scooping. Our family of four stayed at camp while the others took off on another jungle walk with the elephants. Two of us just didn’t quite feel well enough to do the six hour walk. Caden filled his time by planting some seeds with the locals, while Keali played with her sweet new friend Peyton. Scott and I were happy to sit and read.

The rice for dinner was followed by the cute local school girls coming over to our camp to perform a traditional Cambodian dance. They were so graceful and took great fun in showing several of us how to do the dance after their performance.

Sleeping at this point had become no problem. We were all professionals at the mosquito nets, dealing with night time runs to the toilets, and quite used to bugs.

Day Seven:
A quick glance at the rice followed by elephant poop-scooping finished up our last morning at the camp. We were all ridiculously happy to be going back to running water, flushing toilets and air conditioning. Our time at the wildlife sanctuary was a once in a lifetime experience that none of us will ever forget. While it was physically difficult at times, contributing to the elephants (and even the ducks) and the environment was beyond meaningful and rewarding. Additionally, we all now have a far better understanding about what to look for when trying to find ethical animal sanctuaries to donate time or money to. The cherry on top of the whole thing was the incredible new friends we met while we were there.

We spent a couple of days at a nice hotel in Siem Reap, eating meat, swimming, and relaxing before we jumped on a plane to Shanghai.

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