Pratida and me

Within thirty minutes of arriving at the Elephant Conservation Center (aka elephant camp) I was sitting atop an elephant. I was briefly introduced to Pratida, which means princess, and then told to get on. We were to spend the morning learning by doing and in the afternoon we would be given a list of the commands to learn. There are a few ways to mount an elephant. You ask the elephant to bend her leg so you can stand on her knee, grab on to her ear and a chunk of her rather callous skin, and throw your leg over her immense backside. I did this the first time, with the help of two maybe three mahouts pushing my backside up and over. In this moment I realized that there are times when I am glad that I don’t understand the Thai language.

Another even more humiliating way to approach an elephant is to ask her to kneel down on her two front legs. With a running start you jump up and straddle the patient beast, landing so that your face is down and your butt is up in the air. Once the elephant is in its full and upright position, you sit up and while balancing on the spine, swing your feet around and do a 180. I didn’t even attempt this feat as I don’t get much air when I jump. My brave friend Courtney, however, mastered this tactic by the end of the week. Quite beautifully actually; much to her dismay, there are pictures to prove it.

The way I preferred to mount was to ask Pratida to lie down on her side. This way I could easily swing my leg over her neck and hold on tight while she stood up. I wasn’t always positioned properly and more than once I thought I was going to fall off. Luckily that did not happen. We were pretty far from a hospital, and I don’t know if they even have a medivac over here.

Having mastered mounting, I was able to focus on “finding my seat.” At first I was very rigid and held on for dear life. Not that elephants move very fast, but when you are up that high and the elephant swings her head around to sniff the sugar cane in the air, it feels like you could easily topple off. With my knees tucked up behind her ears and squeezing my thighs together (you don’t need Suzanne Somers if you ride an elephant everyday), I was eventually able to let go and learn how to move with Pratida. To rock and sway with her movements, to lean back when we were going down a hill. Eventually, it got so that I wasn’t grasping at the sparse black hairs on her head to save me from a fall but sitting pretty with my hands resting on my knees.