The Elephant Camp

This blog is for my Grandchildren.

Dearest Avery, Michael, Cassidy, Jessica, Savannah, Maile, Dylan, Hunter, Holland, Ella, McKenna and Caroline, I miss you all but especially so when we visited a very special place in Northern Thailand. Check on your globes where that is so you can picture what I am about to tell you.

Two days ago Granddaddy and I and our two friends were picked up at our hotel in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and driven by van to a place about one hour away. We were on our way to an elephant camp. We left the city behind and before long we were in the Thai countryside with flowers blooming everywhere and Buddhist temples scattered along the road. When we reached our destination, we got out of the van next to the Ping River and crossed a very rickety bridge that shook and trembled with our every step. Our guide, Ruchi, had said C’mon let’s go, but immediately was way ahead of us and after a minute or so of inching slowly along the bridge while holding on to the ropes on both sides, I figured out that if you walk faster, it is easier to keep your balance. So by the time we reached the other side of the bridge, we were balancing quite well. At the exit of the bridge there was a sign that said “No more than 12 people can be on the bridge at one time.” I looked behind me and at least 25 or 30 people were walking single file all on the bridge at once. But the bridge did not collapse, happily for us.

We were in a true jungle. There were about eight elephants knee deep in the water and as we walked further in, there were more in an large enclosed pen. A small stand was selling bananas and sugar cane for feeding to the elephants so we bought some and hand-fed them. They would grasp the sugar cane with the tip of their trunks and plop it into their mouths with one fluid sweep. I noticed another sign that said “When feeding the bananas, please give one bunch or half at a time. This keeps the elephants from losing patience.” We thought that was pretty funny but we didn’t want to find out what would happen if an elephant lost patience, so we stuck with the sugar cane.

I learned something interesting at that moment. Ruchi told us that Asian elephants (with the smaller ears) have a lip on the bottom side of their trunk tip so that they can grab hold of something just like you would with your hand. African elephants (with the big ears) don’t have that lip so it must be harder for them to pick things up. Imagine having to pick something up if you didn’t have a thumb. These Asian elephants were able to grasp things with amazing precision.

After we fed them for a while, the trainers signaled for the elephants and immediately the elephants knew what was coming. A bath in the river! Elephant handlers or trainers are called mahouts and maybe some of you have heard that word before. Each mahout has his own elephant and they usually start out together very young. So the young mahout (maybe 12 or 14 years old) is assigned a baby elephant (I think about three years old because they are with their mothers until then) and then as the years go by they grow up together. The ideal situation is for them to grow old together, but usually the elephants live longer than the people and so more likely an elephant will have several mahouts in his or her lifetime. Ruchi told us that when a mahout gets married, his wife understands that the elephant will always occupy a more important place in the mahout’s life than she will.

The mahouts jumped onto their elephants and they walked one at a time into the river where the mahouts scrubbed them with big stiff brushes while they sprayed water at each other and at the mahouts, and some of them lay down in the water and put their legs in the air. And some of them just sat down and sat there enjoying their bath. And you know, because you’ve all seen elephants, that they smile just like people do, especially when they are happy. I’ll only be able to show you a couple of pictures of this happy scene, but I have lots of pictures and will show you all of them when we get home.

Then we moved on to a performance area where we took a seat with just a few other people and pretty soon about ten elephants with their mahouts paraded out onto the grounds. Don’t forget that this is not like going to the circus at Reunion Arena. This was in the jungle and the seats were very simple and the grounds just bare dirt. The elephants gave a demonstration of how they help their masters by doing very heavy work that men alone aren’t strong enough to do. First, each elephant would drag a large log (a whole tree really) from one side of the space to the middle. Each elephant did this until they had a pile of logs which they then proceded to place in a big pile just like Lincoln Logs! The amazing thing was that two or three elephants would pick up one log by placing their tusks under the log and then holding it with their trunks and walking with it to the place where the pile was to be. Sometimes, instead of the log falling onto the pile nice and straight, a log would end up catty-wampus or on an angle. No problem. There was another elephant at the end of the pile whose job it was to push the errant log into its proper place. At the end, the pile of logs was as neat as it could be. All the time I was wishing you all were there because you would have loved it. And the elephants were smiling and waving their trunks in the air.

Then they demonstrated how they raise one leg so the mahout can have a step to step on for getting on top of their backs. Or they would put a back leg up so the mahout could stand on it to get down. But the best part was the elephant painting. The mahouts set up an easel and the most talented of the painting elephants took some paint brushes and painted a real painting, choosing the colors and the brush and making the brush strokes with its trunk. Ruchi said they have been known to actually paint flowers! The paintings were for sale but we never did have an opportunity to buy one. Look up elephant paintings Chiang Mai on the internet and see what you find.

Then it was time for our elephant ride. We climbed up some steps so that we wouldn’t have to climb the elephant and stepped into a howdah which is the little two-seater car that is strapped to the elephant’s back and off we went. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was a lot harder than I thought it would be to hold on and keep my balance. I kept thinking I was going to fall out of the howdah. That would have been so embarrassing! The first thing they did was go downhill and that’s the hardest part. After they leveled off it was a piece of cake.

Pretty soon we were old pros and a group of about 15 elephants each with its mahout and two of us greenhorns were lumbering through the jungle, sometimes on very narrow passageways and sometimes uphill or downhill. As I said, downhill is the hardest because you think you are going to be thrown forward, but we weren’t. Finally, we got to the river and the elephants walked through the water back to the camp. The whole thing took about an hour. We looked for gibbons (large monkeys) along the way but we didn’t see any.

The end of our visit to the elephant camp was a ride on a large bamboo raft down the river. The raft was propelled by a rower with one pole and we each had a turn at poling down the river. It’s not so easy because you have to stand up and move the pole from one side to the other just like on a canoe but it’s much wider and the bamboo slats are very uneven. I only tried for a minute or two, but Granddaddy was a pro in no time! It was a long ride, at least another hour, and we had time to reflect and be lazy and wonder at how beautiful the graceful beasts are and how much like humans they seem. While I was floating down the river, I imagined the following story.

About a thousand years ago, in an ancient Thai village, when the elephants roamed free and life was even more simple than the life I just described, there was a very kind and benevolent king, King Michael, who was the ruler of that part of the jungle. His people loved him very much because he took care of them and was careful to be sure they always had enough to eat and work to do building grass huts and growing crops. The animals in the jungle loved him too and the elephants and the gibbons and the beautiful colored birds would all flock to the village to be near him. King Michael had three beautiful daughters, the Princess Avery, the Crown Princess Jessica, and her Royal Highness the Princess Cassidy. Because the elephants were always there visiting and had nothing else to do, the princesses would ride all day on their backs across the river and up and down the jungle paths.

Eventually, His Majesty decided that since the elephants were spending so much time in the village, they could help the villagers cut down trees and carry logs so that the villagers could build log houses instead of grass huts. And in return he would be sure they had plenty of bananas and sugar cane to eat. But the elephants didn’t know how to do the work. So King Michael appointed three villagers, Br’er Dylan, Br’er Hunter and Br’er Holland, to be mahouts to train the elephants to work. Pretty soon the three mahout chiefs had recruited lots of other junior mahouts in the village to help and in time they taught the elephants how to carry the logs from the deepest parts of the jungle to the village. And then they taught them how to stack the logs to build houses that were much more sturdy than the grass and thatch huts that the villagers were used to living in. The three princesses were a little annoyed, because now the elephants didn’t have as much time to play as before.

As time passed, the village grew more prosperous and people from neighboring villages wanted to come there to live. Three lovely maidens from a nearby community came with their parents to reside in the now prosperous village. Their names were Savannah, Maile and Ella. They were not princesses like Avery, Cassidy and Jessica—they were only poor children whose parents were peasant farmers. When they arrived at the village, they wanted to help their parents build their new house and so they asked the young mahouts to show them how to direct the elephants.

Dylan helped Maile, Hunter helped Ella, and Holland helped Savannah and before long they were having a lot of fun riding the elephants while the elephants pulled the logs. They even taught the elephants how to pick up babies with their trunks and carry them gently to the river’s edge for a bath. Maile and Ella had a baby sister named Caroline and Savannah had a little sister named McKenna and the babies loved to be lulled to sleep cradled in an elephant’s trunk while Maile, Savannah and Ella kept a protective watch over them.

One day the three princesses were riding on a raft down the river while a boatman poled them over rapids and through eddies and another servant fanned them with banana leaves. Maile and Savannah were on the shore directing their elephants when they noticed the princesses sweltering in the summer heat in the middle of the river. Hello! they cried. Come over here and help us cut logs for houses, they called. The princesses were shocked! They didn’t do the work of mahouts, they thought, and so they continued down the river. Finally, Avery sat up on the raft and said to the others, “This is really boring—riding back and forth on the river, but if we help those girls we will get to ride the elephants just like we used to and we can have fun again.”

The others were not convinced, but after some discussion, they decided to give it a try. They were princesses, after all, so it wouldn’t do to just pitch in and work like common ordinary villagers. They would watch for a while and then maybe if they felt like it…

So they ordered the boatman to pole to shore and let them off of the raft. After disembarking, they stood and watched while the villagers and the elephants worked.

Br’er Dylan, who had recently been promoted to chief mahout, said to Her Royal Highness, the Princess Cassidy, “Ma’am, if you’ll just jump up on this elephant and help her pull her log, I’ll be able to go into the forest and cut down another tree.” HRH was quite indignant, but what could she do, so she did as he instructed. Then Princesses Avery and Jessica were instructed to do the same. At first, they couldn’t quite get the hang of it, but Dylan, Hunter and Holland, and Maile, Savannah and Ella were laughing and joking and making a game out of what the princesses had thought of as work. And with the help and gentle instruction of the mahouts and the girls, the princesses began to get the hang of it. So pretty soon they were all talking and laughing and working and the time was flying by.

Just then King Michael happened by in his royal coach and saw all the children working together and the elephants behaving like well-oiled machines and he was puzzled. Are those my daughters working with the peasants and the mahouts, he thought. My goodness, they are my daughters and they are having so much fun! I have never seen them laughing so hard. Because he was such a wise king, he quietly moved away and did not intervene or interrupt the progress of the work.

At the end of the day, the girls and the mahouts took their elephants to the river’s edge where they allowed the elephants to bathe in the river and wash away the day’s grime and the aches of the long haul. The mahouts showed the princesses how to take grass brooms and sweep the dirt off the elephants’ backs while at the same time giving them a gentle massage. The children bathed in the river as well, and they felt refreshed and cool.

When it was finally time to go home for the evening, the three princesses looked with wonder at their new friends. Princess Jessica said, “I must say I never knew it could be so much fun doing so much work!” Princess Avery and Princess Cassidy agreed. Savannah smiled and said, “Having something important to do is the most fun one can have.” Maile came forward and said, “And if your work is helping other people it is even more fun.” And Ella, the youngest of the three, said, “And if you are having fun, you will do your job well, and doing a job well is the best fun of all.”

The years passed and the village grew and King Michael had descendants that carried on his tradition of love and kindness and the children in this story grew older and married and taught their children how to work and the village grew and grew and today it is called Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, and sits on the banks of the mighty Chao Phraya River where the elephants once roamed.

Good night my babies, I love you all, love, Grandmommy