Hi there, my name is Steve and I first met Dokkoon, Kulab and Num oi in Thailand in 2005, and haven’t left their sides since. They were living in a university quarantine facility three hours Northwest of Bangkok with five other elephants (destined for Sydney’s Taronga Zoo). It was a very quiet and beautiful part of Thailand, surrounded by hills, rivers, waterfalls and farmland. I lived there for six months with two other keepers from Melbourne Zoo (who had been there for nearly two years!) and three keepers from Taronga Zoo.

The second part of the quarantine process happened on Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small tropical paradise about three hours flight west of Perth, out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Cocos is an Australian territory and has a functional quarantine facility. The people living there are either Aussie or Cocos-Malay. It is used by the Air Force and also has a growing tourism industry, focusing on relaxation, surfing, windsurfing, kite boarding, fishing and diving.

We arrived on Cocos by plane after leaving the quarantine facility in Thailand 24 hours earlier. None of us had slept during this time and we were running on pure adrenalin. The locals had been waiting for us to arrive for about two years, so you can imagine the buzz around the island as we finally touched down. It took the elephants about a week to settle in to their new home, so it wasn’t long before they were chasing each other around, having wrestling matches, stomping on land crabs the size of a dinner plate and destroying all the young coconut palms they could get their trunks on. The three months we spent living on Cocos went way too fast and has left a lasting impression on all of us.

We parted company with the Taronga elephants and keepers, arriving back in Melbourne on November 6th, 2006. It was great to be home, but it felt strange to know that this part of our journey was over. Since then, things have been moving ahead incredibly fast. We introduced the elephants to the rest of their keepers, to Mek Kapah our 35-year-old female, and eventually to Bong su, our 34-year-old male….both of which had not seen another elephant for over 25 years!