Ban Ta Klang

All the visitors planning to tour Thailand must make it a point to visit the Elephant Village or Ban Ta Klang. This village is located in Surin province and it can be reached via Highway 214 by covering 36 kilometers and left for 22 kilometers. The people in the village belong to Kui, an ancient tribe. People here in the village are called Suai and they are highly efficient to capture, train and raise the massive animals. They are nurturing elephants since hundreds of years and it has become a tradition of this village. At Ban Ta Klang, you will find a popular elephant museum that includes illustrations about different techniques used to raise elephants, the tools used for capturing the big giants, the history of the elephants in Surin, elephant skeleton, organs, etc. The area is favorable to elephants as there are lots of grass and plants for feeding them.

History

People in the Elephant Village used a way to avoid their recruitment for wars, during the Ayutthaya period. For that, they offered huge quantity of elephant feed to the king. Earlier the mahouts of Kui enter neighboring Cambodia to detain wild elephants. After the war in Cambodia that practice was stopped, but the village of Ban Ta Klang still continues to raise elephants. Older elephants give birth to baby elephants every year in the area.

Elephants are family

Here in the village of Ban Ta Klang, elephants are treated as a part of the family. The mahouts of Kui do not use the animals for the purpose of any hard labor, rather they are treated with love and care. The mahouts train the elephants brilliantly so that they can walk as per the directions of the mahouts. The elephants can take different turns, move forward and walk backwards and they can use their trunks to lift the mahouts to sit on their backs. Times have changed and people in the village do not train the elephants at their homes any longer. There is a training center, which is named the Elephant Study Center. In this center, there are experienced elephant trainers that help the people to learn different techniques for teaching different skills to the elephants. The center also houses a museum that displays various tools that people in the village used to detain elephants and also the history of the village.

The village of Ban Ta Klang has become very popular among the tourists of Thailand. Many visitors love to take a ride over the elephants and they were taken for a ride to the Mun River area under proper supervision. Mahouts used to bathe their elephants in the river and the visitors can watch the playful attitude of the animals while taking bath or watch the elephants getting trained, the visitors can arrive on Saturdays between 9 am and 11 am in the morning.

The entrance charge per person is 100 baht.