Gail's Elephant Diary

HAPPY ELEPHANTS! Watching elephants bathe in the Maya Oya River is a great experience. Most of all I love to watch the juveniles who are just like any other young creatures. So eager to get into the river, they rush through the village with the rest of the herd, jostling each other to get ahead and be the first in the water. At first they seem to just adore to be surrounded by water thoroughly loving this twice daily ritual, continually taking water up their trunks and swishing it back over their bodies. What a great feeling that must be?

Five young elephants have wandered over to a deeper area of the river, where they totally submerge themselves in the water, obviously enjoying the feeling of weightlessness. Ducking under the surface and rolling around, clambering over each other and sinking back into the water, a look of utter contentment on their faces.

This part of the Maya Oya River is quite wide and on the far side are lush forests including palm, rubber and banana trees. Suddenly I notice another group of juveniles ambling across the rocky river bed to this side, lolloping along as if so excited to get to the other side with a feeling of mischievousness, as they get further away from the careful eye of their Mahouts. But the Mahouts seem relaxed and let them continue with their adventure. The youngsters wade out onto the narrow ‘beach’ and then start to climb the steep bank of a rich red soil. There are around a dozen of them, probably ranging from 5 to 8 years old. Oh, I can now see what they are up to! Some of the older ones are now on the top of the bank and the game is to slide down the muddy bank, Oh what fun! One or two of the younger ones are trying to scramble up the bank, but just keep sliding back down, again great fun. Oh to be an elephant. Hours of pleasure for them and me, thank goodness I have got some good binoculars.

Oooops, 3 elephants are now wandering off into the forest, investigating the tasty foliage as they go, I’m now panicking to see if the Mahouts are watching, but they leave them for a few more minutes, before crossing the river themselves to encourage them back to the herd.

Catch up with my blog & find out more about elephants!

Tusker in Kaudulla National Park
(taken in 2008)

The Sri Lankan elephant (Elephas Maximus Maximus) is a subspecies of the Asian Elephant.

Elephants: Sri Lanka's Gentle Giants

Elephants have always held great cultural and religious significance in Sri Lanka. They are
symbols of wisdom, power and wealth.

Elephants are a central part of most Sri Lankan religious festivals. The Maligawa Tuskers are particularly revered by the Buddhist population. It is the 'Maligawa Tusker' who leads over 100 elephants in procession and is entrusted with the most sacred of relics - the Tooth Relic of the Buddha - at the famous Esala Perahera festival in Kandy. The tusker is draped 'from trunk to tail'
in brightly coloured cloth decorated with light bulbs. When a much loved Maligawa Tusker named Raja died in 1998, the government declared a national day of mourning. His stuffed remains are kept in a special museum within the grounds of the Temple of the Tooth.

Today there are a few thousand elephants in the wild and several hundred in captivity.
Domesticated elephants have served Sri Lankans for over 2000 years, even helping to clear
land for tea plantations.

Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage

Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage has the largest herd of captive elephants in the world. It cares for more than 80 elephants, from majestic old tuskers to playful newborns. Most of the elephants who live at Pinnawela have been orphaned or injured in the wild.

Visitors are welcome to watch their bathing routine (after which the elephants cover themselves with dust to prevent insect bites). Elephants are so important in Sri Lankan culture that local schoolchildren are taken along to learn about how the elephants are cared for. There are also daily feeding sessions when the baby elephants are fed from oversized babies' milk bottles - and visitors are allowed to help.

Just down the road from Pinnawela is the Millennium Elephant Foundation, a museum with various displays and exhibits on elephant related topics. Here, only a handful of elephants are looked after (mostly retired working animals) so visitors can have a truly hands on experience, interacting with, feeding and cleaning the elephants. You can also go for a ride on an elephant. (We have ridden Kumala, it's exhilarating if a little bumpy!)

A mahout with his elephant at Pinnewela Elephant Orphanage

A mahout with his tusker

All the elephants love going to bathe at Pinnawela

Elephants going to bathe

A baby elephant being bottle fed at Pinnawela

Feeding a baby elephant

As animal lovers, seeing the importance of elephants in Sri Lankan culture inspired us to dedicate our brand to these magnificent creatures.
Our visits to Pinnawela were so memorable that we decided to support the work that they do. So for every cup of Kandula Tea you drink it really is 'good for you and the elephants too.'

School children visiting Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage

School children at Pinnawela

Gail on Kumala

Elephant Fact:
Number One

The elephant has the longest gestation period of any mammal - up to 660 days or nearly 22 months.
Imagine that ladies!

An elephant with its trunk raised in the air is meant to be
a symbol of good fortune...

Elephants in Culture

Elephants in Fiction

Ganesha
Modern Hindu Temple, Matale

Ganesha is a Hindu God, instantly recognisable by his elephant head. He is the Lord of success and destroyer of evils and vanity, selfishness and pride. He is also worshipped as the god of education, knowledge, wisdom and wealth. Ganesha's elephantine head symbolizes the soul, which is the ultimate supreme reality of human existence, and his human body signifies the earthly existence of human beings. The elephant head denotes wisdom and its trunk represents Om, the sound symbol of cosmic reality.

The Elephant's Child
having his nose pulled by the crocodile.

Illustration by
Rudyard Kipling

From Rudyard Kipling's
Just So Stories
First published 1902

The Elephant's Child tells the
story of how a baby elephant
of 'insatiable curiosity'
acquired his long trunk.

Elephant Appreciation Day is on
September 22nd!

The day 'celebrates the earth's largest, most interesting and most noble endangered land animal'. We at Kandula Tea agree that 'the elephant deserves to be appreciated and upheld as an example of courage, strength, self-reliance, patience, persistence, and general high quality of being'.