First of all, a visual contribution (left) from our very own Chris Peck, entitled: “How To Fail Math Tests With Dignity.”
O.k. They don’t have elephant saddles. You stand very close to the right side of the elephant, right up next to it’s right shoulder. Never stand next to it’s left shoulder. I don’t know why. But if the mahout tells you to NOT stand on the left side of your 9 foot tall, 9500 pound elephant and you have Peter Ngande’s story of an elephant grabbing a full grown 500 pound lion by the tail and repeatedly slamming it into the ground until it was dead (see the August 16, 2009 blog entry) … well, I’ll take his word for it. I don’t need to know why right and not left.
When you are up this close to an elephant, it’s basically like you’re face up against a gray wrinkly wall. You can’t see anything else. You give the command, “Song sooong!” If you are dealing with a trained, domesticated elephant, and it doesn’t knock you down and crush your head like a pumpkin, or pick you up and slam you against a tree, or wrap it’s trunk around your torso and tear you in half, well, here’s what happens: the elephant lifts her right foot. You – the tourist – put your right foot on her right raised knee. You put your hands up over your head. With your right hand you grab the top of her right ear. You put your left hand on the gray wrinkly wall and grab a handful of elephant skin (kind of like a handful of heavy, textured, padded canvas). 1! 2! 3! You push off and up with your right leg, your elephant boosting you up, you pull with your hands on her right ear and the handful of skin just below her right shoulder, pulling yourself up, swinging your left leg up and over her neck. And now you’re on her neck, just below her head. In the words of Andy Quitmeyer, an elephant looks a lot different when you’re on it.
It would work best when I’d get a good push with my right leg. It was humiliating when I’d get stuck hanging and have to pull and scramble with my upper body (no support any more for the lower because the elephant had put his foot down.
My elephant’s name was Jojo. The mahouts all called him a “ladyboy.” He is naughty (the mahouts that speak English love this word – “naughty.”) And he is huge. Most zoos in the U.S. won’t bother keeping male elephants. They are thought to be too dangerous, mostly because of their periods of musth – high levels of testosterone that make the fellahs horny, cranky, and completely unpredictable. Thai mahouts believe that, through the elephant’s diet, they can roughly control when and if an elephant goes into musth.
Jojo was 20 and had not gone into musth yet. Getting on Jojo for the first time was unnerving. I had no idea what to hold on to or where to lean, or how to balance. My eyes were wide open and so was my mouth. I kept thinking about the lion being slammed into the ground. But maybe I wouldn’t even need to be slammed into the ground? Maybe I would just slide off Jojo’s mighty 9-foot high neck and break my own? I figured out that if I put my hands on his head that I could kind of make a tripod with my butt and my hands – a little bit of stability. His head was enormous. His head would move quickly, but it’s so enormous that it doesn’t feel like it’s moving quickly. I guess they’re fast the way a 3-year old can be fast – all of a sudden they’re across the room and into something (there’s a lot of infantilizing that happens with elephants and here I’ve just done it myself). It wasn’t really soft – maybe it was like that dense heavy “memory” pillow stuff that had been upholstered over an unmovable boulder that had been mounted on four and a half tons of bedrock? Two or three inch long black hairs bristled off his big wide gray melon head, wrinkly skin folding and draping over cartilage, giant wide ears handlebarring off to either side of my knees (the creature-designers for Where The Wild Things Are must have spent some time with elephants). You’re supposed to tuck your knees up to his ears. A lot of squeezing with the knees. My breathing calmed down. By that afternoon, I could look around and see other things besides my hands pressed into the top of Jojo’s head.
Tag long: an alternative for getting down. You swing both of your legs over his ears and put them side-by-side over his forehead. The elephant drops down on his front knees (I think) and puts his forehead down and you slide off on the ground, feet-first. To get back on, you do a running sort of gymnast vault onto his head, trying to kick your legs and feet out and around and over his ears. You end up landing face down on his neck and back. He stands up and you swivel around to face forwards. Another way to get on and off is non long. With non long the elephant lies down – not completely down, like a golden retriever getting it’s belly scratched, but with the head up. Once he’s down, you swing your leg over and hop down on the side opposite his legs.
So this is how you get on a domesticated elephant. How do you get on a wild elephant?
You don’t.
I asked why a culture of domesticating elephants had grown in Asia but not Africa. I was told that African elephants were too big and too aggressive. Asian elephants stand from 6-11 feet high and weigh 3-5 tons. African elephants stand from 10-13 feet high and weigh 5-7 tons. They have names like Vinny. They carry switchblades. They were raised by wolves and belong to a gang called The Jets. And nobody wants to ride them.
You probably heard about this – Tilikum, the 23-foot long 6-ton orca who swims in a tank at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. He’s among the largest orcas in captivity and it seems that he’s not happy about it. On Wednesday February 24, Tilikum pulled trainer Dawn Brancheau underwater and didn’t let her up. In the past twenty years he’s contributed to the deaths of three trainers. SeaWorld was recently bought by the Blackstone Group from Anheuser-Busch InBev. Killer whales are big money. Tilikum will probably never be released – his sperm is too valuable.
The day before we left Bangkok we went to the Grand Palace and Wat Pho, where we saw The Reclining Buddha. He was amazing. 50 feet tall, 150 feet long. All gold. Huge. The Jesus people should get in on this big-god thing. It works really well. It was very hot. I didn’t have pants. I had shorts. So I had to rent pants. Actually, borrow the pants with a 100 baht deposit. Cover the knees. Cover the shoulders. Do not touch or approach the monks. Be respectful. At The Reclining Buddha there were big signs that said (in Thai and English) near his huge inlaid feet: DO NOT TOUCH, MOTHER OF PEARL. There was a large tour group of Russians who, clearly, could not read Thai or English, because they were all taking turns touching the Buddha’s feet.
So we go to Bangkok. And then we’ll go to Chiang Mai. And then we’ll go to Lampang and the Thai Elephant Conservation Center to learn how to be mahouts. Or at least a Disney version of a mahout. On the planes: lots of people wearing white masks. Swine flu fear? Bird flu fear? Some paper masks, some more intense. The really intense ones were the Tokyo airport (Narita) cops with their ear pieces, their white masks and the brimmed military caps pulled down low so you can’t see their eyes between the brim and the top of the white mask. The stewards and stewardesses on the flight from Tokyo to Bangkok were all young, beautiful, crisp, sharp and flying on an ancient 747. They gave us orchids as we were landing. The glamour, or the drag of glamour is still part of air travel in Thailand. In the U.S. it’s starting to feel like a new Soviet-era, where people are standing in lines and yelling at each other.