Bali - Elephant Safari Park

By Rough Guy’d

Later that night, I took the time to see a Kechak dance. While I could have looked it up on the Internet to find out what this was, I thought it would be more fun to go in blind so I turned up with nothing more than a liberal coating of mozzie spray, camera and an open mind.

Granted I knew this dance was done for the benefit of the tourists rather than some attempt to keep alive a centuries old tradition but sometimes you just can’t avoid these things. Looking back at my experiences during my travels, while I can’t say any of these tourist traps were the highlight of my trip, overall, my trip would not have been the same if I had gone out of my way to avoid them and more often than not, by partaking in these little artificial tastes of tourism, I found something or someone far more worthwhile of my time as would prove to be the case the following day.

Today I decided to do something a little bit different for me. I decided to splurge out and went to the Elephant Safari park. Now this was a big chunk of my cost with the price of admission at $53USD but apparently this place attracted international celebrities (they have their own helicopter pad) and profits went toward looking after elephants (the movie Operation Dumbo drop was based on them). To put this into context, my room including breakfast only cost me $5USD. Now the park was a fair way out from anywhere else so the only option I had was to get a taxi motorbike to the place and then have the taxi wait an hour or two for me to be finished. Already stinging a bit from the price of admission and riding one of the Elephants, I decided to release the driver and make my own way back.

The park was pretty good and my timing for once was impeccable with a pair of baby elephants recently allowed out to see the visitors. I even managed to get a ride on an elephant (albeit a bit contrived) which all things considered wasn’t too bad. Afterwards there was even a little show with the elephants and they taught us why each elephant had their own mahud (trainer) and why they had to look after them like they did. After about five hours or so, I was kind of glad that I released the driver, especially when I managed to hitchhike with a Japanese gentleman in his four wheel drive.

Finally to cap off this day, I caught another show, this time the Legong and Barong dance. I found this one to be more interesting though the first one involved dancing around a fire. Most interestingly the biggest influence on my time in Bali came about as I was heading home after the show. I saw a cute-looking girl staring at a poster and I struck up a conversation with her. It turned out that she was from Malaysia and she was in Bali, her second home to buy art to sell home. The girl (I’ll try not to name names) invited me to tag along and join her if I wanted as she was going to another town for the day that was less aimed at ripping off tourists.

Little did I know that by accepting, I would be making another friendship that would lead me to more experiences that I never expected...