Elephant ride
Rebelling a little against the cliché of doing a hill-tribe trek from Chiang Mai, I finally agreed with Katie to sign up for a 3-day trip arranged through our guest house while we waited for our Laos visa to be processed (which it turned out could be done most cheaply by sending a courier back down to Bangkok on our behalf).
This kind of thing is a bit overdone in Chiang Mai, and I think there are more authentic experiences to be had further north in smaller towns near the border with Myanmar or in Laos. Indeed, the hills seemed to be swarming with other groups doing exactly the same thing, although the guides did a good job of orchestrating things so only one group was staying at a particular village at any one time.
The hiking during the day was sweltering, and then after sundown the temperature plummeted, and we lay under a thatched roof on straw mats over a hard wood floor, swaddled in blankets trying to keep warm. The first night was at a camp in the jungle next to a beautiful waterfall where we all had a brisk but refreshing wash, and watched as our guides prepared a vegetable and chicken stew with rice over an open fire.
After dinner we sat around a roasting campfire of dry tropical hardwood and we tried some local moonshine (rice spirit) while being alternately entertained and tortured by our guide's guitar playing.
The second night (after a hot climb) was in a village on a ridge-top. There were a couple of motorbikes that managed to get up and down the path to the village (that was otherwise a 2 hour walk), although it would have been a challenging trail on a mountain-bike, and during the 5 month rainy season it must be unridable.
The villagers were clearly used to having us as visitors, and although appreciative of the financial benefits to them, I didn't feel that they had completely shaped their lives around 'performing' for the tourists - many villagers casually wandered up to the campfire we had gathered around and warmed themselves for a while before slipping of into the dark without a murmur. After dark, the villagers showed us a series of visual riddles using little wooden sticks - some we mulled over for minutes before giving up, others we solved in a few seconds to roars of applause.
The trip also included a brief river-float on a bamboo raft - a pleasant, but superficial experience - and an elephant ride. It's hard not to appreciate the magnificence of the elephants and the strangeness of the ride with their slow, undulating gait. It was like being on a bulldozer traveling across a waterbed.
When the elephants spotted a good-looking bush or tree in the jungle they would just wander off the path into the trees, grab a branch with their trunk and rip it free or bend it down so they could step on it until it snapped (sometimes demolishing an entire 20 foot sapling). This they then carried in their trunk, munching away at it, as we might a carrot, until it was gone in less than a minute.
It was clear that there was very little in the jungle that posed any obstacle to them - nothing less than 10 feet tall or as thick as your arm had any noticeable effect on their pace - they simply ploughed through it and as riders we escaped most of the bushwhacking as long as we ducked the branches above us. It was a slow, but majestic way to travel.
Most of these elephants used to be working elephants in the logging industry. I have read that between 1939 and 1991, the original forests of Thailand have been reduced from 80% of the land area to just 19% - a statistic that finally prompted the government to ban most logging efforts in the country. As a result, hundreds of elephant-owners have turned to tourism as a means of making ends meet.
I can't say what the conditions were like for the elephants in the logging business, but it was disturbing to see how they were treated during our visit. They had pink spots on their ears and feet which I am told is an indication of poor health, and our particular handler (who rode on the elephants head in front of us, steering with his feet behind the elephant's ears) was a short-tempered teenager who would impatiently jab the elephant with a metal pick when it refused to obey him. It was hard to stomach, and although it appears that now the elephant's livelihood depends on tourist rides like this, it is difficult to endorse them based on our experience.
This kind of thing is a bit overdone in Chiang Mai, and I think there are more authentic experiences to be had further north in smaller towns near the border with Myanmar or in Laos. Indeed, the hills seemed to be swarming with other groups doing exactly the same thing, although the guides did a good job of orchestrating things so only one group was staying at a particular village at any one time.
The hiking during the day was sweltering, and then after sundown the temperature plummeted, and we lay under a thatched roof on straw mats over a hard wood floor, swaddled in blankets trying to keep warm. The first night was at a camp in the jungle next to a beautiful waterfall where we all had a brisk but refreshing wash, and watched as our guides prepared a vegetable and chicken stew with rice over an open fire.
After dinner we sat around a roasting campfire of dry tropical hardwood and we tried some local moonshine (rice spirit) while being alternately entertained and tortured by our guide's guitar playing.
The second night (after a hot climb) was in a village on a ridge-top. There were a couple of motorbikes that managed to get up and down the path to the village (that was otherwise a 2 hour walk), although it would have been a challenging trail on a mountain-bike, and during the 5 month rainy season it must be unridable.
The villagers were clearly used to having us as visitors, and although appreciative of the financial benefits to them, I didn't feel that they had completely shaped their lives around 'performing' for the tourists - many villagers casually wandered up to the campfire we had gathered around and warmed themselves for a while before slipping of into the dark without a murmur. After dark, the villagers showed us a series of visual riddles using little wooden sticks - some we mulled over for minutes before giving up, others we solved in a few seconds to roars of applause.
The trip also included a brief river-float on a bamboo raft - a pleasant, but superficial experience - and an elephant ride. It's hard not to appreciate the magnificence of the elephants and the strangeness of the ride with their slow, undulating gait. It was like being on a bulldozer traveling across a waterbed.
When the elephants spotted a good-looking bush or tree in the jungle they would just wander off the path into the trees, grab a branch with their trunk and rip it free or bend it down so they could step on it until it snapped (sometimes demolishing an entire 20 foot sapling). This they then carried in their trunk, munching away at it, as we might a carrot, until it was gone in less than a minute.
It was clear that there was very little in the jungle that posed any obstacle to them - nothing less than 10 feet tall or as thick as your arm had any noticeable effect on their pace - they simply ploughed through it and as riders we escaped most of the bushwhacking as long as we ducked the branches above us. It was a slow, but majestic way to travel.
Most of these elephants used to be working elephants in the logging industry. I have read that between 1939 and 1991, the original forests of Thailand have been reduced from 80% of the land area to just 19% - a statistic that finally prompted the government to ban most logging efforts in the country. As a result, hundreds of elephant-owners have turned to tourism as a means of making ends meet.
I can't say what the conditions were like for the elephants in the logging business, but it was disturbing to see how they were treated during our visit. They had pink spots on their ears and feet which I am told is an indication of poor health, and our particular handler (who rode on the elephants head in front of us, steering with his feet behind the elephant's ears) was a short-tempered teenager who would impatiently jab the elephant with a metal pick when it refused to obey him. It was hard to stomach, and although it appears that now the elephant's livelihood depends on tourist rides like this, it is difficult to endorse them based on our experience.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home