Morning of the big day. We showered and packed for the elephant trip, debating whether Patara would miss our business enough not to come get us. I looked up the phone number and headed to the sala where Peter and Pai were preparing breakfast. When I asked them to call for us they seemed a little stunned. Apparently upon not hearing from us Patara called the hotel and confirmed with Pai and Peter. Relief!!!!! I floated back to the room to let Weena know and we could hardly contain ourselves.
Patara Elephant Camp is a conservation and breeding organization to rescue and preserve Elephants. There are hundreds of Elephant encounter excursions here, the majority of which have you and forty other tourists watch an Elephant paint with its trunk, watch the elephants kick a football, then have you sit in chairs strapped to the back of the elephant for a half hour jaunt through the forest, that’s that. The elephants are treated poorly and it is just not a nice environment. Ween, having fully inherited the Stachow research gene, had looked everything up and found this one place. The highest rated thing to do in Thailand by trip advisor. Only eight people a day get to do it. It is by far the most expensive thing to do in Thailand at almost 6000 baht per person, that’s like 200 bucks a person, more than any hotel or anything. But. You are an elephant trainer for a day. You get your own elephant and guide for the whole day. You are up close and personal, inspecting it, cleaning it, riding it, feeding it, bathing it, swimming with it. There is a photographer and videographer following you everywhere so you don’t have to take your own pics and vids. Traditional thai lunch is included and they pick you up and drop you off at your hotel for the hour long drive into the mountains. Seems worth it considering its like 70 bucks to get into seaworld and you don’t get to ride the whale. Curiously enough, for all the tourists in Thailand, two of the other guests at Secret Garden were also headed to the Elephant camp. An American couple from Connecticut.
I’ve always wanted to write Connecticut. Now I’ve done it twice. Connecticut. Thrice.
The nice clean new van picked us up, the only other couple, an asian Australian couple, already having been picked up, and we headed off to the mountains of Thailand, chatting excitedly.
The van stopped once at a market to pick up our lunch, and before we knew it we were in a gorgeous valley covered by a dense green. Small thai stilt houses sat over farms along the valley floor, mountains out of Jurassic Park rising up on either side. We pulled off the road, grabbed our packs and followed our guide to a little hut next to a babbling brook. We signed our waivers, always a good sign, and changed into our outfits for the day. Bathing suits with long loose pants overtop, sandals, t-shirts over which we put on our official elephant trainer woolen ponchos, and finally and most importantly, fifteen gallons of sunscreen and bugspray. Our guide, a lovely smiling man whose name I did not catch at any point in the day, explained to us that at all other camps you see elephants doing unnatural things, you ride in a chair, you don’t get to know the elephants or love the elephants or take care of the elephants. Here, you wash elephant, ride elephant, feed elephant, swim with elephant, it is your elephant, this way you will love the elephant. You support the elephant by choosing this camp, and this helps them continue their breeding to prevent extinction and cruelty. His English was broken to the point of being shattered, but we got the idea and our nerves were jangling as the time to meet our elephants for the day came closer.
It was explained to us that we would meet our elephant, see its mood, if it liked us we would stay with it, if not we would get a different elephant. They’d keep switching till they found one that liked us. If none liked us we’d wait till everyone was done and go home. No pressure. I’ve never wanted to make such a good impression on an elephant in my life. When you approach them, if their ears are straight out and they are looking right at you, that is bad. Bad sign. If they are twitching their tails and ears around and swinging their trunks, good sign. When we meet them we have to keep talking to them, keep eye contact, and keep feeding them. This way we make the bond. At this point I saw them. Across the river in a big field, they were wandering around and picking at grass, throwing dirt over themselves to keep the sun off. These are not pretend. They are giant solid beasts, one complete with giant tusks. Holy crap.
Armed with what we could understand of the instruction, our fancy trainer ponchos and a whicker basket of small bananas and two balls of sticky tamarind and salt we headed across a small bamboo bridge to the field where the elephants stood. The giant baskets of fruit were just a snack for the elephant, who eats a tenth of their body weight a day. The balls of tamarind and salt have two purposes. Well three really. First, the salt makes them thirsty which makes them drink more. Good for digestion. Second, the tamarind goes through them and turns into seeds which they poop out four hours later up on the mountain which grow into our own tamarind tree (we can all say we have our very own tamarind tree in Thailand now), third, they like it. Okay. As we walked along the bank of the river our guide pointed out the humongous deep footprints in the mud, filled with water. Their front feet are big perfect circles, their back feet are more elongated ovals. It was explained that the elephant is so important for the environment because he pulls down fruit and leaves that other smaller animals can’t reach, he poops out the seeds which fall into the water filled footprints, a perfect combination of fertilizer water and seed.
There was one giant right down by the river. Quan was his name. He was the example elephant. Jenny from Connecticut was teamed with him. We approached and were taught when we went to our own elephant we would raise our hands and call out the elephants name. If he talked back it was a good sign. She did so and Quan curled up his trunk and let out a little honk. Good sign! She was now allowed to approach and start feeding. After learning the proper ways to do so we were each led to our own elephant. I got the biggest guy, Weena got the fella with the tusks. If that elephant gores my sweety he is in so much trouble! Of course, everyone else gets elephants with names like Poi and Waa. Ours are called MaiSaiThong and MaiSeesomethingorother (Hi guys! Celina again! I believe that “MaiSeesomethingorother” can be directly translated as to meaning “Tusky Wonder” which is what I called my elephant for the duration of our time together). Its hard to get them to trumpet to you when you can’t even say their name. Eventually we must have gotten them right because we were allowed to approach. Here I’ll just start to explain my experience because we were all split up out of our couples. Now we were teamed with our elephant, not each other. Feeding an elephant. Wow. First of all, being that close to one is terrifying. Getting to touch its skin, its bristly trunk. There aren’t words to describe it. Getting to look right into its eyes and speak to it. Saying deedee (good job), bon (banana), and whatever else you could think of to try and make him like you. You hold up the banana and say bon, he raises up his trunk and you see into his mouth. Its more like a vertical slit, its lower lip being a long pointy thing, its upper lip basically just being the trunk, its tongue doesn’t come out, its more like a lump of soft white or pink muscle, the inside of its cheeks are like two more mounds of vertical muscle on either side, and the roof of its mouth is white muscular flaps of folded tissue (they have two compartments in their mouth, one of which they put lady poop in to tell if they are in heat). So I hold up the banana, say the magic word, keep eye contact, and jab the thing in there. It sucks my hand in, it felt like getting your hand crushed by four water balloons covered in hair gel. MaiSaiThong would then lift his trunk back up for another banana and I’d shovel another one in. This continued for about ever. When I’d pause to reach for another he’d point into his mouth with his trunk, like get on with it, and when I was finished the basket he kept lifting up his trunk for more. Gimme! I don’t know the word for sorry in elephant yet man. (Celina’s turn: So, Tusky Wonder has these gigantic tusks. Huge. Lovely. But they happen to get in the way while you’re trying to feed him his treats. I had to keep dodging them and work around and through… it took a while to get the hang of, we we got into a feeding rhythm after awhile.) So I’m rubbing his trunk, trying to make a lot of contact, and I’m asking him how his day is, what he’s been up to, just trying to make conversation. At this point all six of us were spread out all over the field but I could see we were still timidly at arms length from the giant beasts, slowly getting more bold with touching, but keeping our distance.
We were called back to Quan by the guide and it was time to learn how to give an elephant a check up. Must check four things! One. Tail and ears waving. Mean good mood. Two. Sleep. Elephant sleep on side, sleep for ten minute, get up, lay on other side, sleep for ten minute, this for four hour a night. If elephant sleep is good sign, they have mark on side. If elephant no sleep mean they sick, no get up, no lay down is too hard to get back up. Three. Sweat. You know where elephant sweat? No? Feet. (only the toenails really, weird) You touch foot, if damp is good. Mean drank enough water. Four, poop inspection!
Here our guide bent down to a pile of poop from apparently three hours ago. First you count the poops, five and up is good, less is bad, only one big one very bad. Then you pick up the poop, break it open.
There's no smell because they are vegetarians. Inside you’ll find the grass and fibers, if they are small that’s good, means the elephant has good teeth and his digestion is working. It should also be damp. Remember the four things and back to our elephants. At this point I’ve named mine Ugly. I approached Ugly and checked everything. Strange bending underneath an elephant and scraping your finger along its toenail to check if its sweating. I hadn’t done that before. At this point I was feeling a little braver and was much more hands on with Ugly, patting him, rubbing him, feeling the papery wrinkles of his skin. Finally, poop inspection was passed, my guide did most of the work breaking open the thing, squeezing the water out, then he let me sort through it. All in all what I would do on a normal day with my own poops. Ugly has passed inspection! That means he gets a bath and exercise in the form of crushing my balls up and down a mountain! Lucky Ugly!
Back to Quan. We learned the commands for come, down, up, none of which Celina nor I could remember in the hyper fast way they were given to us, and we were taught how to clean an elephant. Back to Ugly, where I grabbed his ear at the bottom, gave a tug and kept repeating Mai to him, which is the closest I could remember to come. We made our way up the riverbank towards the lowest point of entry. It is tricky walking right beside an elephant on uneven ground. You feel the weight of them, the presence of them, and they stumble and slip just like anything, so it is a little scary. If those feet come down on yours, I’d go from a size 11 to a size 20, length and width. (Celina: En route to the river, Tusky Wonder and I ran into another elephant in front of us that didn’t want to budge. My guide indicated that I should just push through with Tusky. Push through we did, and that elephant in front of us just didn’t want to move, so there I was sandwiched between his giant behind and Tusky’s side. From my limited experience with horses, I know to not stand behind them and thought the same would be true for elephants, but apparently not. I didn’t get kicked at all, I just got a little bit wedged).
Finally we stepped down into the river itself. I don’t like getting dirty. I am dainty. And I hate sand. Well, I had on these surf shoes my buddy got for me in Newport. They have holes along the side for water to get in and out of. This does not work the same with the nine pounds of river bottom that sludged into my shoes, threatening to bury them deep in the bosom of the river. Sure, water flowed through, but those little shoes were like goldpans, sifting out all the sand and rocks and placing them lovingly underneath my feet. The other thing about me you probably know is that my feet do not get out much. They are my gosling feet. Baby soft and white as cream. They aren’t used to this. So while I was going through what amounts to cruel and unusual torture in my shoes I was happy to have Ugly to distract me. We waded downriver, it was really fast and about shin deep, deeper in places. Rocks hid underneath the fast moving murky water, but Ugly had no trouble navigating and I just followed his lead. We reached his favorite spot, something I assumed based on the fact that he stopped moving and when that happens he pretty much gets what he wants. I gave him what I think was the command for down, Fah Long, and slapped him up on the side, and he gingerly sat down, folding his front legs and splaying his back ones sideways, a bathing beauty. We had little wicker baskets and some small brushes and we went to work. I think Ugly was the dirtiest fella, he had caked on a ton of sand and mud on his back and head, so we got to scrubbing and splashing. When I ride him, since there’s no saddle or anything, he cant have any dirt on his back or it grinds in and can become a rash which could get infected. So here I am in long pants, soaked to my chest and covered in dirt, dodging the elephant poops floating by (which the trainers scoop out and chuck up into the fields) while this beast gets a spa treatment. But to get that up close and personal with him was amazing, you scrub around his eye, his ears, you even get to do the tail! You brush with the pattern of the skin or he gets fidgety. He followed me the whole time with his eye, blowing bubbles and taking sips of water (6 liters at a time). Another interesting detail, they only breathe three or four times a minute. Weird.
Then the trainers gave them the once over, made sure they were shiny and clean, and we were directed to wade upriver a bit. The trainers lined all the elephants up behind us in the river, like a dam of elephants. We splashed our buckets on them for a bit, giving them one last rinse, then we turned around to “pose for a picture” at which point the elephants gave us a little shower of our own. That was pretty cool. I think three or four of the elephants particularly enjoyed doing the showering. Its funny because these giant ponderous creatures take a while to follow commands so it wasn’t exactly a huge downpour, more like four or five individual jets of water, but with all commands the elephant takes his time processing and following through. You tell him to get down and he’s like, okee dokee here goes! And then three minutes passes and one leg starts to bend.
Alright, next step, they are clean, they are healthy, time for exercises! We led our guys (complete with their “new elephant smell”, still not that great a smell as it turns out) up the bank to a clearing where we were instructed on all the commands we would give while riding. We received about ten words, plus the accompanying actions, all in about three minutes. When it was clear to our lead guide that we had no idea what the hell we were talking about he grabbed a pen and wrote on our hands the entire list of instructions. Mai for Go. DD for Good Job. Hao for stop. Scribble-dee-pen for Get down. Look for up. Smudge for something else and l-something-p for who knows what. Great! Now just hop on and we’ll head up the mountain.
There are three ways to mount an elephant. No shoes allowed. First, up the shoulder. You grab the top of the ear and a rope they tie just under the armpit and around the back, then kick the heel of the elephant, at which point he bends his leg and you step on his heel, then his knee, then swing up on top. No problem. Second, up the trunk. Two hands on his forehead and whatever the command for down is, the he sticks his trunk out, you take two steps up and hop onto his neck, then spin around and you’re there! Finally, have him lay all the way down on his side and walk up his hind leg. Celina got on Tusky Wonder no problem, maybe not as smoothly as she would have liked, but for someone who hasn’t mounted an elephant before it seemed good to me. (Celina here: I was pleased with the first half of the mount- it’s kinda like climbing a tree, but when it cam to straddling just behind his ears, well it’s much wider up there then you think. I had to keep hoisting my body over and over and over and finally I made. Certainly not as graceful as I had hoped, but what the heck, I got up there, didn’t I?) Then my turn. I went for the same mount ween used, the ear shoulder one, cuz it looked easy compared to the other two, but they said Ugly couldn’t do those. So around to the trunk where I did the commands and down he kneeled, at which point they warned me I couldn’t get up his trunk either, apparently there’s only one way to mount Ugly and that’s by vaulting over his head onto his neck, then turning around. Of course, they didn’t explain it to me in those words, instead when I looked down and saw no trunk steps they yelled “Like Gymnast!” and I had to infer the rest. According to the video replay though, I think I nailed it. (Celina: Oh man. He really did nail it! It’s kinda like surfing for Josh. I just looked over and saw him vaulting over an elephant head, as though he’d done it a million times before. There must be an elephant-riding video game that he’s not telling me about).
Okay, now we’re on elephants. Weena has a lot of horse riding experience from her youth. I should have but don’t. Weena and her elephant Tusky Wonder were the leaders of the caravan, I was second. It seemed like Weena and Tusky had been doing this for years. You sit right up on their neck (the only place your legs can really span their back) with your knees tucked right into where their ears connect to their head at the top. Then your feet are behind the ears (which feel really cool) and you can use their ears like pedals, speeding up, reverse, turning. That’s assuming you hadn’t rubbed your commands off of your hand while mounting. I was trying real hard to get the rhythm of Ugly, you’re supposed to be able to ride with no hands, but your butt is just on the front of their shoulders and it is not a smooth ride. You really get wobbled back and forth, not to mention the steep climbs we had through this jungle up a mountain. Like, a real mountain, steep, muddy, valleys and cliffs. One thing I learned while watching Tusky up ahead is that elephant aren’t the most sure footed of creatures, they weigh so much they don’t have too much trouble falling down, but their feet slip and slide all over on those muddy paths, which can lead to some very close calls up there. Also, it’s a little foreign being on an elephant, and in about four minutes my groin and legs were shaking all over from the exertion of hanging on. Oh well, only forty five minutes to go! The other tricky bit was that every time we wandered past some bushes or tall grasses Ugly tried to grab it as we wandered past. His trunk was always on the move looking for snacks alongside the trail. Oftentimes what he’d grab on to was pretty deeply rooted or was hanging on tight, so when he swung his head to pull it free it was like a mini bronco ride. Or I guess like a giant bronco ride.
Before too long, and after some seating adjustments and advice from Ween, things smoothed out and we had a most excellent time. At one point we had to cross a paved road and the elephants just step over the guard rail, one foot at a time, and off you go. That is something I did not know they did.
A short time and a lot of altitude later we heard the rushing of a waterfall just up ahead. I’m used to waterfalls being little disappointing trickles. It seems there are always hikes past waterfalls or views of waterfalls and invariably it’s the dry season or they were never that spectacular to begin with. This was different. It wasn’t a tall one, rather it was a wide fast river with various steps. At one end where it came into our view it had about a fifteen foot drop, then it went down a few five or ten feet drops. Including one which had more of a slide or chute rather than a drop, and then maybe forty yards further along it dropped out of view rather dramatically, the kind of cliff you’d be going at in a barrel. We had no barrels though, just elephants. Elephants who were tired from the walk and really wanted into that river!
Our elephants made a bee line for it with us still astride them, strolling in to their favorite spot, a surprisingly deep section just below the chute. So deep in fact that when we got up to it they knelt down and it was just about over their head! They cavorted around in there, Pushing each other gently, spraying each other and us with their trunks, holding their mouths open at the chute as though it were a giant water fountain. At one point I got my leg stuck between Tusky and Ugly, a little scary, it was not easy to remove. Weena’s fella really was a water baby, he’d duck right under, using his trunk like a snorkel, sometimes he’d roll a little over on his side giving weena quite the bath (and quite the challenge to hang on!). My guy was too tall to get all the way under water, and I also think he was maybe a little old to be getting all the way up and down, so he mostly just sat on his butt in there, making for a steep incline that took every muscle in my butt cheeks to hang onto.
Eventually after swimming with the elephants we had to make way for the other four guys to get in to the deep part so we climbed out of the river and dismounted on a conveniently located rock shelf about elephant height. It was time for our traditional thai picnic lunch!
At this point we’d been at it maybe three hours, and it ain’t easy work, so I was starving. Also, I’m always starving. Laid out beautifully on a perfectly flat rock surface beside the rapidly babbling river was our lunch. On a table cloth of banana leaves and palm fronds was a huge variety of humble thai fare. In the middle a huge pile of fried chicken (which is a big thing here, available everywhere), then a big basket of thai fruits none of which I’d seen before. Mangostines, weird furry guys, little yellow fellas. Inside they are generally sectioned like a grapefruit, some with pits, only instead of a grapefruit it is like four or five perfectly smooth peeled grapes. Or, you know when you look close at an orange or grapefruit its made up of thousands of little juice filled tear drop shaped cells? These are like five giant, garlic clove sized individual cells. They are generally more sour than sweet, but so juicy and totally unique. Completely new smells and tastes. Then there was a wide variety of sweets, a lot of thai food is very high in sugar. There were the popular sticky rice with banana, mango, black bean or coconut, there was sticky rice with custard, there was egg yolks mixed with sugar into little balls, there was egg white with sugar and banana, everything wrapped individually with banana leaf. Big bottles of cool water were there as well. All in all, perfection. Best of all, when done, everything but the chicken bones is elephant food! So everything we didn’t finish, which was a great deal, we got to walk back over to the dismount ledge where our elephants were lined up expectantly, and shovel the food and “dishes” and even the table cloths into their mouths. Radical!
Of course while we had been eating the elephants had been chowing down on the foliage in the area and scattering dirt all over their backs to cool off. Darnit! Guys! We just cleaned you! So it was back on to their backs for one more trip into the water, this time with a basket, where they cavorted and we rinsed and brushed them from on top. (Celina: Tusky really liked this part the best and decided it was most comfortable to lie down on his side in the water. I was on his back at the time. So I rolled with him and then had to eek myself so that I was sitting on the side of his tummy rather than his neck and scrub him from there.) Once that was done we had another hour long ride back down the mountain where we had one more rest with some water while the elephants had their real lunch, grasses and banana leaves and palms, and it was time to mount up again. This time we were to ride with our legs in front, down between his eyes along the crown of the head. Siting further forward on the head, like little human hats.
It looked a lot more precarious but we were all a lot more confident at this point so mount up we did without any troubles (though I was a little less smooth this time, Ugly lifted his head too fast, silly Ugly) and off we went along a river, actually right in the river, for maybe another fifteen minutes where we reached the goodbye point. We sadly dismounted (they kneel their front legs down and you sort of slide down their trunk) and they lined up to say goodbye. At this point we were offered more baskets of bananas which we could buy from the local farmers at 100 baht a piece so we could feed our elephants one last snack. We bought one, got some more baht together to tip our guides who had carried our shoes and heavy backpack that entire route, and shoveled more Bons down their gullets. One last surprise were some elephant kisses. They use the tip of their trunk, put it on your arm and do a little suck, its like getting smooches from a vacuum cleaner but a little wetter. It was lovely!
Then a quick change into dry clothes and back into the van and back home where we slept like angels until dinner, had dinner, then slept like angels some more. All in all, it was more than we could possibly have dreamed of. To get that close to an elephant at all, much less to bathe it, feed it, ride it, swim with it. We will never forget it. Never ever!
The next morning was checkout day, and we were sad to have to go. We had our delicious breakfast, and spent the rest of the morning taking pictures of the property and packing up. We enjoyed a last sit on our front porch, settled our bill (three nights, food, beverages… all in 175 dollars). Pi drove us to the airport where we checked in, enjoyed a cookies and cream Blizzard from the DQ and off we went to our new leg of adventure. Chiang Mai was amazing… would the rest of the trip hold up to our adventures so far?
1 comment:
You guys spent a whole day with elephants! Holy CRAP!
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