One more day of volunteering and elephant watching. Our task this morning was to build a road. Yeah, no sweat. Realistically, it was more like clearing the jungle. The Elephant Valley Project has sort of created an emergency access path for motorized vehicles to reach base camp in the event that someone is horribly ill or injured. But maintaining a path in the jungle is easier said than done. Mother Nature is eager to reclaim what was once hers. Soon after, the path became overgrown with weeds and roots and everything else the jungle has to offer. We were given scythes and hoes and told to go at it.

Cindy and I are of good Mexican and Chinese working stock, so laboring away was no big thing. But everyone was put to shame by the Russian-German guy who was born in Siberia (far right in above picture). That dude cleared enough jungle by himself that a family of elephants could have lived comfortably in the new space.

Our reward for hard work rendered was to follow around two more elephants that afternoon. Yesterday, I mentioned that one of the elephants was a jerk to the four we saw, and thus was off on her own with a friend. Today, we would follow the jerk elephant and that friend. Again, we saw them get bathed, and then eat, and kept following them as they ate.

Note the highly effective bath bucket on head strategy

Cleaning out the ears

Leaving the sanctuary

After everyone was dropped off back in Sen Monorom, we made plans to rendezvous at a restaurant run by one of the volunteers’ families. We headed back to the Indigenous People Lodge to wash off our dirt before heading back into the village. I had a Forrest Gump moment of toweling off my face and looking into the towel to see a brown face staring back at me. Watching elephants is not clean fun.

We ate with other tourists from the Elephant Valley Project and then headed out to have a few drinks. Cindy indulged herself in a lemongrass mojito. Today was also our last “real” day of this trip. While we have more days on the road, they are spent slowly traveling back home. Tomorrow, we will wake up early to return to Phnom Penh. From there, we go to Bangkok, then Tokyo, and then San Francisco. It’s been a tremendous, albeit abbreviated, experience. We’ll have to finish what we started some time later.