Another common thing to do here is to go on a “trek”. I’ll post about my crazy Thai-Army-survival trek later, but for Nazma’s sake, we opted for a sanitized, don’t-get-your-feet-wet tourist special. Note we got a discount; otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have done it. The tour-guide even pulled us aside and told us not to talk about what we paid with the other suckers.
Our “trek” involved a trip to the elephant training camp outside of town. All well and good, but it was a little sad seeing the big guys chained up and performing in a sideshow-like “performance” that had the package-tourists hooting. “See elephant dance!” “See elephant paint!” “See elephant play soccer!” (This last one was actually pretty cool – he’d toss it up with his trunk and scissor-kick it with his back foot into the goal.)
Mind you, the alternative is probably extinction: at one time, they used them for hauling logs, but now machines do that, and they don’t have much of a wilderness to go home to, considering the people have stripped the forests, so they end up in these camps.
One stupid lady actually tried to feed them Campinis (those little cream-soda-flavoured stripy candies): zero nutritional value and it doesn’t take much for it to lodge in a windpipe. They were selling bananas there to feed them with, which I guess she was too cheap to buy. We got a bunch and it was gone in seconds. We saw one elephant nip around a guy’s back, take the whole bushel he was carrying and swallow it in one gulp.
After the performance, we got to go for a ride. This was pretty sweet; at one point the handler ran away with our camera to take a shot and we were left sitting on the head, where he’d been. No problem until Bertha started feeling around with her trunk for her errant owner, only to find nervous-Chinese-guy instead. Wet slobbery elephant kiss. Nazma said she’d let that one pass, though I’d pay money to see her take on Bertha (about even odds, I’d say).
On Nazma’s insistence, here’s a picture of a baby elephant to end the post, for you to coo over.
