Animal rights, rather like visiting the Hill Tribes, is a hot topic of conversation among many travelers these days. Elephant camps are a rich topic indeed. While elephants are really quite revered in Thailand, they are not used much anymore for anything other than the tourist trade. There is also not enough land to support that many elephants in the wild, so the question is, what should be done with all these elephants? Camps run the gamut from exceedingly conservation-minded to downright exploitative. The most conservation-minded park I’d heard about was outside of Chiang Mai, probably one to two hours away. They did not allow elephant riding, but had guests interact with elephants and let them get in the river to wash them. I had heard that there were other camps that allowed riding but treated the animals decently.
So, while I had done my research, in the aftermath of Kinsey’s accident and a worry about booking something too late in the day, I didn’t much specify to Korn which Elephant Camp we should go to and it didn’t hit me until the next day that I should have given that more of a priority.
We were picked up early the next morning by a van full of tourists. Not knowing exactly what was happening on our tour, I was surprised when we stopped at a Butterfly and Orchid Garden. Everyone trooped out to a rather dismal looking butterfly farm--an enclosure with about eight butterflies inside. The lack of butterflies wasn’t as appalling as the dishes of rotting, bug-ridden fruit that were set out as butterfly food. Kinsey noted that she saw more butterflies when we were walking down the street.
The orchid farm had some pretty orchids, but there was nothing noteworthy about the place. However, when we stepped into the gift shop, we noted that they really seemed to be selling one type of thing--brightly colored orchid and butterfly jewelry, mostly pins.
After looking at the flower pins for awhile, Kinsey said, “Are these real?”
I looked at them a little more closely. They were bright unnatural colors with gold along the edges, but the interior of the petals had clear delicate petal veins.
“I think so,” I said.
Then we looked at the butterflies, and I saw the same delicate wing markings inside. “I think these are real too,” I muttered and then asked a clerk for confirmation. Yes, both the flower and butterfly jewelry was made from real flowers and insects.
I was revolted--not because I thought that making the jewelry itself was so horrible, but it just seemed like a Psycho kind-of place. Norman Bates gone mad raising butterflies for tourists to see before they buy their mangled bodies encased in jewelry.
At that point, I started to have a bad feeling about our Elephant Camp.
About a half an hour later we pulled into the dusty site of Chokchai Elephant Camp. Everyone disembarked and sorted themselves out according to the type of tour chosen. We had chosen the Elephant Training Camp instead of the Elephant Trekking Tour and found that we were the only ones in our group. A private tour again.
The Elephant Trekking Tour is the standard tour that most tourists to Thailand will choose. It consists of a ride on an elephant (in a wooden seat), a bamboo raft ride, and walking hikes to visit Hill Tribe peoples. Since I was opposed to visiting Hill Tribes and we had done a bamboo raft ride in Yangshuo, I signed us up for the Elephant Training Camp instead. In the training camp, participants are supposed to learn how to act as the elephant’s “mahout,” by learning signals, feeding the elephant, washing it, and finally riding it bareback while giving commands.
The camp leader took us aside and gave us denim shirts to wear.
“These will protect you,” he said. “The elephants like to blow dirt or water on their backs to protect themselves from insects. This will keep your clothes clean.”
Then he shooed us off to where the elephants were waiting. Several mahouts were already waiting for us with two elephants, a regular sized adult elephant and a small baby elephant, although the baby was four years old and apparently old enough to ride.
We started out by feeding the elephants. The mahouts had big bags of miniature bananas and told us to break the bunches apart and put them in the elephants’ trunks. The large elephant could take a bunch of several bananas all at once, but the baby needed one or two bananas at a time. The elephants clearly loved the bananas and greedily ate them as fast as possible. I was surprised to find that their trunks were very hard and muscular and their skin was very rough.
After feeding the elephants, the mahouts got down to business. The mahout in charge of the adult elephant started telling us about the different commands and what they did to get the elephants to obey. He showed us the tool they used--a curved pick with a sharp point and a wooden handle. Kinsey and I were both shocked. The mahout talked on in his broken Thai-English which was sometimes hard to understand. He mentioned things like the elephants having a thick skull with a hollow space inside, thick skin, and other things I didn’t quite grasp. I can’t say I believed what he had to say…I seemed to recall hearing elephants actually had fairly thin skin which is why insect bites bothered them so much. Meanwhile the mahout continued his demonstration, commanding the elephant to do different things like lifting a foreleg or a back leg. These were important so that mahouts could get on and off the elephant. He tried to get us to give some commands, but by then Kinsey and I were both traumatized and told him we had no desire to command the elephant to do anything. The mahout then told the elephant to rise up on her back legs, but we begged him to stop. I think the mahout was a little amused that his western tourists did not want to participate. The camp leader was hanging around and saw our discomfort. He said we would not have to do anything we didn’t want to, so they just got down to elephant riding.
Now, as I’ve said before, I really just don’t read the descriptions of things very well, so I’m always a little surprised by what happens. I knew we were going to ride the elephants; I just wasn’t sure what that entailed. In our case, it meant we would be riding the elephant bareback, like a mahout, straddling the elephant on its neck. Kinsey, however, because she was on the baby, would ride on its back, gripping ropes.
Our first task was to get on the elephant, which is not as easy as you would think, even when the elephant is giving you a leg to stand on. I was hoping we could get on via the loading dock that the Elephant Trekking group got to use, but no such luck. So I did my best, trying to haul myself up onto the elephant, but was having a very hard time. The mahouts were standing around, clearly having been instructed not to touch me in any way. A good push on my rear end would have helped immensely, but no one was going to do that.
“Grab his ear!” one mahout shouted, but I didn’t find that appealing either. Finally I managed to get onto the elephant’s back, and then the mahouts kept telling me to move forward, farther and farther, until I was sitting on her neck with my legs tucked behind her ears.
One of the mahouts clambered up behind me and then we were off. There didn’t seem to be much to guiding the elephant. The mahouts gave us vague instructions about touching ears or pressing with your legs, but we were not interesting in guiding our elephants, so finally the only thing the mahouts taught us was to shout, “Bai!” which apparently means Go! Even then, I wasn’t much for shouting at my elephant, so the mahout mainly yelled. I was too busy figuring out how to stay on.
Luckily, elephants move pretty slowly unless they’re riled up, and these elephants weren’t looking to crash off through the brush. There was a well-worn trail that they were supposed to follow and they reluctantly headed off. Sitting on an elephant that’s walking flat or uphill is not too difficult. There’s some balance involved, and a little bit of leg squeezing, but otherwise, it’s not too tough.
Going downhill, though, is another matter entirely. After a short walk down the path, we came to a short steep downgrade to a tiny creek. First of all, the trail was barely a footpath, the bank looked like a tiny ledge, and there were rocks in the way. I wasn’t sure how the elephant was going to navigate this, and then she stepped down.
Now, there was nothing for me to hold on to. The mahouts had told me to use my hands to press down on top of the elephant’s head to keep my balance, so I was pressing like crazy, thinking that at any moment, I was going to pitch over the top of the elephant and land in its path. Elephant heads are also pretty bizarre because they have really rough, wiry long hairs on the top of their heads, and they’re also a little spongy…you’re pressing into a layer of fat. So I’m clinging and pressing into the elephant, hoping I’m not hurting it in any way, while trying to stay on.
Kinsey, meanwhile, is having problems of her own, trying to hold onto ropes in front and in back in order to stay on the broadest part of the elephant without sliding off.
The walk continued, and the elephant ride was alternately thrilling and terrifying. We kept on passing the Elephant Trekking tourists who were comfortably riding in their seats on the back, but I could tell they thought the bareback riding was really cool, and why weren’t they getting to do it?
Halfway through the ride, the mahouts hopped off, confident that we had gotten the jist of riding. Our elephants wandered down the track next to the river, and now there were bamboo rafts of tourists floating by and every single one of them took pictures of us on our elephants. So in places across the world, Kinsey and I are part of a lot of tourist slide shows.
The ride finally ended and we managed to get off. The camp leader told us to go back to the building for lunch with the rest of the tour crowd. Unfortunately, the food at Elephant Camp was pretty poor. It was standard Thai fare, but not cooked particularly well, as evidenced by many full plates being abandoned. Kinsey and I sat at the picnic tables debating whether to have an ice cream when the leader came by again.
I knew we were supposed to wash the elephants in the river, but after that I had no idea what was on the program. Also, because of Kinsey’s bike accident, I didn’t want her to get into the water to wash the elephants because I feared she would get an infection. The wound on her knee was the worst and had not scabbed over well enough. The river water certainly didn’t look clean, so I told her she’d have to sit out the washing. Then, in order to be fair, I told the director we’d both just sit out. He nodded, and said he’d just have the mahouts do it, and we could watch from the bank.
“What are we doing for the rest of the day?” I asked.
“Going on another ride,” he said.
I had loved riding the elephant, terror and all, but I didn’t particularly feel like I needed to ride again. Kinsey, however, wanted to try riding a large elephant, so I asked the camp leader if she could ride a big elephant.
“Of course,” he said.
“Are we just going the same way?” I asked, as this seemed a bit dull.
He mumbled something unintelligible, and I didn’t pursue it.
So we went back to the river and watched the mahouts washing the elephants. The elephants loved the water and lay in it, sometimes letting it cover their entire heads except for their trunks. The mahouts scrubbed them and played with them.
After the river bath, the elephants were led out, and we met them at the loading area. I got an even bigger elephant this time, a male, and Kinsey got a slightly smaller adult female. By this time, the mahouts were just walking and calling the elephants, and everyone seemed a little less uptight. They led us all to a much less traveled path, and I think the elephants enjoyed it more because they could stop and eat along the way. I quickly learned which plant the elephants favored--some kind of tall, broadleaf grass. Any time my elephant saw a stalk, he’d flick his truck out, pull it out of the ground, and munch away. Sometimes he would stop for a patch until the mahout yelled at him, and at other times, it was eat and go. In any event, the elephant seemed to be enjoying himself and the mahout rarely seemed to be calling “Bai! Bai!”
At some point, I stopped watching my elephant and looked around. We were in a drop-dead gorgeous ravine, filled with green trees, vines, and sunlight. There were beautiful hillsides all around and everything seemed pristine and peaceful. The elephants kept munching and walking. I kept pressing my elephant’s head and trying to stay on.
At one point, though, Kinsey’s elephant got a little too wayward, focusing on some grass too near a steep drop-off, and the mahout got sour, yelled at the elephant, and gave her a knock on the head with his stick. Kinsey felt terrible, and it was the one bad moment of the ride.
I thought a lot about elephants and Thailand that day. I didn’t really like the way the mahouts handled the elephants in some respects, but I decided that if you have to have a relationship like that, the elephants have to recognize the mahout as the alpha leader, so the mahout does have to be strict--not wimps like Kinsey and me. Also, if you’re going to use elephants as working animals, they do have to have some discipline or someone riding them is bound to get hurt. It’s a delicate balance. Personally, I decided that a lot of animals work and there was nothing inherently wrong with elephants working as long as they were treated well. I do think there should be some sort of limit. Thailand is overrun with working and performing elephants and there could be more regulation on who does it and how many elephants can be bred or used for that purpose. In some sense, I am sure that Chokchai does not mistreat the elephants. At one point, the camp leader mentioned to me that an good young adult elephant costs 1 million baht--between $25,000 and $33,000 USD. In a country as poor as Thailand, that is not an insignificant amount of money and you would be sure to treat your investment well.
At the end of the ride, I climbed off the elephant my arms aching from pressing on its head, my heart thrilled from having had a great experience on the elephant ride, and my spirit a little saddened by the treatment of the mahouts. Maybe I should have chosen camps more carefully, but I learned a lot from this one.
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