Elephant trekking in Mae Hong Son

The Rough Guide advises not to do an elephant trek. This is too touristy. Touristy!

I know that an elephant for commuting is not so practical anymore, but the journey is breathtaking, blood-curdling. Tourism is not negative. Yes, if you go out with Neckermann in a group and don't have to take any initiative. A trip along the Rhine, for example. Or clap when the Martinair plane has landed. Or forty Japanese with a straw hat and a tour guide with an umbrella. Enough about this.

At ten o'clock we, Sven from Norway and I, leave by jeep to an elephant camp in the jungle southwest of Mae Hong Son. Of the four elephants present, one stands with its head under a decking. We can get to this three-meter-high platform by stairs and from there easily step on the elephant's back, where a particularly uncomfortable double seat has been installed. Because it has rained heavily in recent days, we cannot make the normal one and a half hour trip. Too much water and too slippery. The elephant boy, mounted on the beast's neck, leads him in a certain direction for several hundred meters. There, the elephant decides to go back on its normal route, despite strong protests from the elephant boy. 45° descents. Narrow paths, sloping sideways, towards a ravine, where a turbulent river flows. Mountains full of greasy, slippery clay.

An elephant can retract its legs where necessary. He places his flat legs exactly where this is possible and where he finds something to hold on to. We rock back and forth, to the left and to the right especially, because he has to eat bamboo all the way if necessary. I don't feel happy, especially going downhill. At one point the animal stops on a narrow slippery path two feet wide, screeches with its trunk or better, it sniffs. He doesn't want to go on. Whatever his boss does, he won't do it. In fact, he moves his front legs towards the abyss and, while we float above the ravine and are terrified, he manages to turn around. Way back. His float dismounts and puts a rope around his left ear, secured with an iron pin. The elephant refuses to go in the right direction. So we make a detour through the jungle, down a terrible slope. The elephant boy drags him along with difficulty for the rest of the route. He repeatedly refuses. Then we take another road (so no road). Later we hear that an injured elephant probably walked on the original path and if an elephant smells blood from a colleague, then there is danger, so he refuses that path.

I must confess that when the elephant turned and his front legs were a meter lower than his hind legs, I really thought that this would be my end. So I'm never doing this again. The advice of the Rough Guide is correct. After half an hour we stop on a sloping mountain. The elephant gets on his knees on command and we can get off. Thank God. On the ground floor I get chatter again. When the elephant leaves, I loudly shout 'hold'. That's elephant language for "stop." The elephant stops. I shout "how". He's going again. Elephant language is very simple. Simpler than ภาษาไทย.

On our walk back we arrive in a small village. The children are too poor to buy kites. By the way, there is no kite shop. So big beetles are caught. They get a string around their waist and so the children have a lot of fun with a live kite. One beetle doesn't want to fly, so he is given to grandma. She breaks off the wings and gobbles it up nicely.

Incidentally, we hear, when we return in us hotels from which the tour was organized, that the normal route follows the course of a small river. Rocky, but fairly flat. With excessive stir, there is an alternative route, which largely follows a motorway (or at least a clay strip that is passable by cars), flat and wide. In our case, the elephant refused this last route, as he disliked the sound of cars, so he went back to the original route, but there was too much water there, so we had to go up and down the adjacent mountains. It was no ordinary trip.