Elephant Karma November 2014

Elephant Karma

It seems here in Thailand I’ve landed in a little whorl of elephant karma.  Never have elephants figured so prominently in my life.  Of course, years ago when I worked at Marine World Africa USA some of my friends were elephant keepers so I knew some of their elephants close up and personally.  But really, elephants always scared me, and rightly so.  They are quite capable of killing people and do so, in both captivity and in the wild.  I have always been respectful but admired elephants at a distance.

  

But here in Thailand this trip I find myself immersed in elephants.  Last week I took a train up to Lampang to visit an old Marine World friend and former elephant keeper, Richard Lair.  He moved to Thailand more than 30 years ago to study elephants, helped found the Thai Elephant Conservation Center (TECS) and he is still here, married to a Thai woman.

My day with Richard at TECS was great, and I left totally impressed with the care of their elephants and their commitment to their health and well-being.  In Thailand elephants were long used for transportation and for logging forests but they have since been replaced by roads and modern machinery.  Elephants are long-lived and expensive to maintain, and they need to earn their keep. Now, their only work is in the tourist trade, with some elephant facilities better than others. 

  

The elephants at TECS have a good life.  The fifty plus elephants here, retired from logging, or orphaned in the wild when elephant poachers kill the adults for their tusks, are put in different situations depending on their talents.  Some of them carry tourists on their back for rides.  Some perform in logging demonstrations, or paint   pictures, or play drums in shows for tourists. But none put in more than four hours a day of work, only four days a week. Between shows they are given daily baths in the lake, and fed lots of good quality food. At night they are tethered on long chains out in the forest where they can wander and select their own foods to eat.

 

Some of the elephants here are being taken care of at the elephant hospital.  Three elephants there lost part of their legs to land mines, and are fitted with prosthetic limbs.  Elsewhere two orphaned baby elephants are being taken care of by “wet nurse elephants”, cows whose calves have already been weaned but still have milk, and readily take to a new offspring to raise as their own.

TECS is a government-run facility and the mahouts have an equally good life at the center, working civil service jobs, with their housing provided, and health care, school for their children and retirement subsidies. Elsewhere in SE Asia, at private run facilities this is not the case and both elephants and mahouts are over-worked and “under paid”.

It wasn’t only captive elephants I learned about this trip to Thailand, but wild ones too. I spent a weekend with my friend Sompoad Srikosamatara and his graduate students in a village on the Burma border where wild elephants and humans have had negative interactions including deaths on both sides.

The villagers were moved to this elephant area when their former homes in the valley were flooded by a dam.  The elephants attacked their huts, ate their crops, etc at first, but Sompoad’s students have been helping the villagers devise non-lethal ways to keep them away.  And, the weekend I was there the villagers were holding an “elephant merit-making” festival to help people understand and appreciate elephants and to reward the wild elephants too, with spiritual things like blessings by monks, and practical things like salt licks too. 

The day long festival included people from three different ethnic groups, all living near this village, with the children and most adults dressed in their traditional clothing.  Monks chanted prayers, dignitaries like Sompoad gave talks about elephants, students painted pictures of elephants for a contest, various groups performed traditional dances and songs, women cooked and served lots of their traditional food, all for free, as part of everyone’s “merit making”.

 

At one point we all signed a large piece of orange cloth with our names and good words about elephants and helped tie it on a huge tree.  Later on we all traipsed into the forest to help dig holes and add salt to make a salt lick as a gift to the elephants in an area they frequent with elephant dung to prove it.

I was the only farang (non-Thai) at this festival and felt very fortunate to be there.  I left with a better appreciation for elephants and an even stronger love for the Thai people too!

Return to Taman Negara November, 2014

When I think of tropical rainforests I will always picture Taman Negara, the premier national park in Malaysia and the first rainforest I ever spent time in.  Thirty years ago Bucko and I traveled there at the behest of the government of Malaysia to survey otters in this park.  For two weeks we traveled with rangers and boatmen up and down the river on long-tailed boats seeking the tracks, scat and other signs of the two species of otter that most probably lived here.

It was the time of our life, but we were young then, and such things were easier.  Now, with thirty years of age and a similar amount of weight accumulated, I was eager to go back again, expecting the worst but driven to go there nonetheless.

This time there was no government support for my visit and no research to conduct.  Instead I went as a regular tourist on a “3 day, 2 night package” out of Kuala Lumpur.  All details were taken care of.  At 8 AM one morning I boarded a minibus, at 11 AM I was at the boat dock in Kuala Tembeling and by noon I was riding with a group of other tourists on a long-tail boat for the three hour journey up the river to the park headquarters.

The river was broad, like I remembered, the big sandy beaches were devoid of people and the old growth rainforest trees towered high above the water’s edge. On the surface, at least, during the ride upriver, things had not changed all that much. 

So, lulled into complacency I was not ready for the sight of the visitor area in the park.  Where once there had been only a single lodge and campground on one side of the river, now there were scores of hotels, countless guest houses and a dozen or more floating restaurants, a regular city here in the jungle.  But lucky for me it was the rainy season, off-season in these parts, and most of the beds and tables were empty.  Believe me, I don’t ever want to go there in peak season and neither do you!

Even though I was part of a tourist package I was eager to break out of the mold, and the pictures Bucko suggested I carry with me did the trick.  Thirty years ago, like now, I was snapping photos of everything, using slides then, but converting the best images into prints.  And this handful of prints included photos of the local boatmen who accompanied Bucko and I on our otter survey.  Sure enough when I showed these photos to local guides they took me to two of these men, retired now, that still lived in the area.  Although I still can’t speak Malay and they still can’t speak English, the words “memerang” (otters) and Shabrina (my counterpart) were evident in their excited comments.  They remembered Bucko and I and our otter study.  And now they have the photos to prove it.

The second day at Taman Negara I managed to break away from the tour group in another way.  Our group was loaded onto a small long-tail boat and taken to a concrete dock up the river, at the base of 200 steep railing-less concrete stairs leading upwards to the canopy walkway, another bunch of stairs to the top.  This walkway, a series of 10 rope bridges suspended about 1/3of mile in length gave an exciting view of the rainforest and river below and I’m glad I experienced it.  But by the time I climbed up the stairs and up to the walkway, I was beat.  “OK, now we are climbing to the top of the mountain, another 1000 stairs,” said our guide. Not me.  I arranged with our guide to meet them back at the boat dock.

And this was a wonderful idea.  I purchased some soft drinks from a ranger at the walkway, then got the boatman to take me up the river to a local Orang Asli community I had noticed on a nearby beach.  I climbed up the bank to the cluster of huts, called out to alert people, then dropped the sodas off at the entrance to one of them as a gift.  Eventually two children came out of a hut, sipping their sodas and smiling shyly at me, not a tourist encounter at all.

The boatman soon came to pick me up and take me to a place closer to the dock where he could watch for the tour group returning from their mountain trek.  And me?  I jumped into the Tembeling River once again and floated there, fully clothed, alone but for the boatman, enjoying my memories of times gone by.  My visit to Taman Negara was a success!