The Great Elephant Caper

OK, sometimes we do hokey tourist things just because we’ve never done them before and they look like fun.

The Elephant Training School provided one of those opportunities.

Asian elephants are an enigma right now. They’re endangered and are suffering in the wild because of a diminishing habitat. There’s an “orphanage” that has over 100 young elephants in it because their mothers have been killed in various ways.

Traditionally, a young boy was more or less attached to an elephant and they became a team for life, doing all kinds of useful work. They lived together and it probably wasn’t a bad gig. Times change, though, and the youth of today aren’t as eager to scoop elephant poop as a career, regardless of the glamour involved. They want to live in the City, and we all can imagine how hard it would be to keep an elephant in a 5th floor walk-up.

The other problem is their primary employment now is giving tourists rides. Is this really the fate to which these noble and useful beasts are relegated?

Regardless, we found ourselves plopping down 350B (about $11.00, plus a 100B tip) for a ride on an elephant.

Their skin is not soft, as you might imagine. They feel nothing like a leather recliner, and have hairs about as coarse as a fine copper wire that are about an inch long. The keepers must either have skin of leather or Kevlar underwear beneath those silk riding togs they wear!

We agree that riding beasts is not especially a favorite pastime. Neither had the horse fixation growing up, and other things to ride that lacked an internal combustion engine were in short supply.

Elephants did nothing to change that perception. The passenger sits on a saddle that appears to be more like a porch glider than anything else. These could seat two people, although we opted for separate elephants in hopes of getting a drag race going.

No, wait – it was so we could take pictures of each other.

Theirs is not a smooth gait, at least for the uninitiated, causing the rider to frequently bonk his head against the umbrella pole stashed against the back of your neck. The seats also didn’t feel especially secure, tending to tip toward one side or the other kind of like a boat does unless you balanced in the middle.

You go out from the mounting area (a raised dais with a flight of stairs up it), load your elephant and off you go. Getting onto them is significantly easier than getting out of the longtail boats, though.

The driver takes you on a kind of predetermined course, designed both to provide photo opps and to show the agility of these enormous beasts. At one point, they were guided through steel poles which had a space at the bottom of only about 18 inches wide.

We crossed vehicular streets a couple of times, which raises the question – who has the right of way between a car and an elephant? More importantly, does it matter?

Overall, the elephants seemed somewhat bored with the process. It can’t be exciting for them to walk the same route over and over, carrying people back and forth. It was kind of fun, although we both had moral qualms about it later that remain unresolved.

They’re pretty impressive, though, right up there next to you.