Lana was our Mahout; a dying Thai profession of elephant rider, driver and carer.
Until mechanised logging took over, elephants were the muscle that pulled down trees and carried logs to the river for transport. An estimated 12,000 worked in the forests of Thailand alone but that number has dropped to below a hundred. This lead to an unhappy period for the native Indian Elephant, with owners seeking a return from ever more exploitative practices.
Thankfully the national sentiment is changing and elephants are now seen as an important cultural asset. Many charities care for them, as with donkeys in the UK. Tourists pay to ride them to raise money for their care.
We rode with Lana on Mob, a twenty-something female, for a hour, to the river and around some dry, muddy ravines. Mob washed in the water and threw mud and pebbles across her flanks to dislodge parasites. She reached high into the trees for the choicest shoots and lumbered slowly but sure footedly up and down slopes that car drivers would have reconsidered.
She paused to scratch her belly on a boulder as she walked over it and flapped her ears constantly to keep cool, the thick cartiledge in her ear flaps banging hard against my feet that rested on her neck.
We mounted and dismounted from an elevated set of steps and processed in a Howda chair mounted on her back.
Her skin was leathery and covered in bristles, her ears and forehead speckled with pink.
We fed her bananas which she took from our hands with her trunk, its end forming three dextrous fingers. She blew hot air in our faces and tried to snatch my camera until I finally tugged it back, to wipe off the produce of her runny nose which is actually an extension of her top lip. She chewed whole conconuts and bone crunching sounds emanated from her mouth.
People say it is cruel to keep them in captivity.
Mob was well fed and placid. She received excercise every day and was not roughly treated. While she was tethered by a small cord around a hind leg, there was tenderness in the way Lana worked with her. There was intelligence in her eyes and she seemed untroubled by her daily routine, mixing with other elephants in pleasant surroundings.
She can lift a log the size of a car.
It wasn't Lana and his small stick that made her do anything.
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