Anyone who loves the feeling of meeting an elephant face to face - or has always wanted to - goes to Thailand. The elephant has marked places in their history as warrior/tank, tractor of the ages and symbol of a country and its rulers. Over the years, the beast has been released from its shackles of manual labour, at least for most. The rulers of the past and their immense wealth don’t amass the stables of elephants as a sign of prosperity anymore. There is no land left for them to roam freely, only sanctuaries where they are fed and cared for or nursed back to health. Elephants find themselves as a focus of tourism carrying cellphone wielding travellers as they snap pictures, in the place of kings and hunters. Even this is being stopped as is elephant interactions with humans. Where is there place for an animal that drinks a bathtub full of water a day and eats between 200 and 600 pounds of food?
Meet Mr. Mao Submark and his elephant Noom-Sek. Together for over 37 years this duo has made their way to stardom in popular Thai movies and are well known around Northern Thailand where they are from.
Mahouts play both driver, trainer and best friend to their elephant. They are entrusted with its care. They rarely own the animal, but treat it as some might a shiny collector car in the West. These pairings of man and beast are almost always found together, some sleeping with their elephant. There is a direct connection which can be felt within even a brief time with the couple.
On a blazing hot day during the Surin Elephant Round-Up, An elephant is allowed to pull cool water into its trunk and spay it on itself….and its mahout.
So with no other place to go, where to these two go? How does a mahout leave his or her charge? How does this couple find food enough to survive? Where do they find a place to cohabitate? What will sustain their survival? It is not just the elephant, but the mahout and their family that must survive as well.
Mr. Mar Submit is 80 years old and is know as a “Krubah” a master teacher of mahouts. The respect for him by many is easily seen.
This is a hard life. It makes little money, unless you can stay active in the quest for more of it. Events, movies, tourism or even circus styled occasions are all that stands between prosperity and death.
The 93 year old Mr. Boonma Sandee may be the oldest “Krubah” of the bunch. He carries with him a horn that was used in the ceremonies of the day. As a leader of all things elephant, he is treated as a dignitary and afforded the kind of respect given to people of great power.
An apprehensive young girl attempts to face her fears by getting close to the elephant. The elephant wraps its trunk around her and presses the end against her ear.
For Thai people, the elephant still stands as a major symbol of their country.
Ubiquitous at events where elephants are found are people giving the elephant money which he gladly scoops up with a dexterous trunk and hands it to his mahout sitting on the back of his neck.
Begging for money at events is a huge source of income for an elephant and its mahout. Back and forth to festivals, elephants can be seen riding solo with their mahout in the back of huge trucks filled with hay and sugar cane stalks.
Elephants by the truckload arrive in Surin, Thailand
A mahout takes a rest in the shade before heading out for more action on the set of Surin’s Elephant Round-Up where 160 elephants are part of a war-time reenactment.
Mahout’s and their steads. In the picture are mostly very young elephants in training.
In Surin, Thailand in the middle of November the Elephant Round-Up takes place. Here 160 elephants and their caregivers and mahouts amass for 3 days of events. The biggest of the days starts early and sees a parade full of colour, marching soldiers carrying identical red flags resplendent in their dress uniforms. Officials under cover from the sun wait for salutes and presentations. Children dressed as frogs dance followed then by Surin’s beautiful girls sparkling with gold conical crowns resembling “Apsaras”. The apsaras dance: fingers trained backwards as is the style, heal to toe walking and flexing slowly as if they were walking a tightrope. Their arms gently pushing air around in a Tai Chi fashion. It is graceful and mesmerizing. A few parade floats wheel their way by the officials, they are all elaborately decorated with carefully placed grains of rice dyed in various colours, watermelons carved as lotus flowers and all manner of sugarcane and other vegetables and fruits. I look around to spot a hundred or so Western tourists amongst thousands of local Thai people. I feel privileged to see something like this before it doesn’t exist anymore, as it tends to go.
What would Surin’s Elephant Round-Up be without 160 elephants taking part in the elephant buffet?! Over 2 days an army of volunteers pulls out all the stops in laying out thousand of tonnes of pineapples, melons, bunches of bananas and sugar cane. It is arranged in deep rows along the side of the main road on sturdy tables lined end-to-end and the beasts eat and eat. In-between meals tourists take rides.
A Thai tourist screams as a baby elephant walks up for a hug.
At the end of the parade comes the sound of a muffled thunder with a curious sound of a grandfather pacing in worn out leather slippers. The elephants arrive for the spectacle we have all been waiting for: The great Elephant Banquet. Truckloads of fruits and vegetables have been arrange in rows and stacked on sturdy tables lined one by one for a city block. The elephants are allowed to gorge themselves. They pick up watermelons with their trunks and place them under their slippered feet and gently crush them into 3 or 4 pieces, chucking each one into their mouth with their trunk like they were eating popcorn at the movies.
Later the elephants pick up passengers for money and trawl around munching and drinking. For the bold, standing still while elephants continually pass you on either side, sometimes touching both of your shoulders at once, can be an exhilaration. Their skin is hard and wrinkly and their hair like needles. A trunk occasionally reaches out to sniff the camera sometimes covering your head in a thin layer of snot. Stepping around soccer ball sized dung you make your way over to a large grouping of bananas and hand it to a passing trunk.
Behind the scenes of Surin’s Elephant Round-Up’s main event at the soccer stadium, a senior elephant makes a gentle connection with the camera.
For lovers of elephants, this event is one worth the extensive travel to get there, but it leaves you with mixed feelings. As a traveler you want other to see this amazing event and yet you want to keep it the secret it is. More people brings a further need for security and safety that stand in the way of a local event that really doesn’t want the pressures of change. Or will this be the one place where the mahout and the elephant are destined for? Will there survival depend or be crushed by tourism?
Masses of elephants are on full display during the war reenactment at the Surin soccer stadium.
So the question remains - what is an elephant good for? I for one believe that they were here first. We have an obligation to see to their safety and happiness. Their bond with people is difficult to quantify. There is so much to learn from these great animals, the treatment of which needs to continuously develop toward the positive. Yet there needs to be a balance here with how we think of them. We can no longer have them do the work of heavy machinery, just as we must keep them busy and financially self-sustaining. We won’t be able to return the elephant to the wild. Those that try have struggled with being just a bigger zoo. And their interactions with visitor should remain as a tactile experience for both the elephant and us. This may not mean riding them, which is a conflicting idea in many minds including mine. Elephants walk a fine line, and in our engagements with them, so must we.