Mahout of the Golden Triangle

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

The elephant looks bigger when the Thai mahout is riding.

The magazine sent me to the Golden Triangle this weekend. The place is associated with the massive amounts of opium that used to flow out of there, basically due to Britain's drug-dealing imperialism in China. It was an ideal spot for it as it is the confluence of three countries: Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, with China lurking nearby. The borders were extremely porous up until recently and the only risk that smugglers ran was getting a little wet.

This is still fairly recent history and driving around the roads one is bound to run across several army road checks. The place has been cleaned up on the Thai side now and I got a laugh at the occasional disillusioned hippy who'd come to the infamous drug running spot only to be confronted with the twin anathemas of safety and giant tour busses full of happy Swedish retirees.

Greenhouses probably not full of poppies.

Still, the Golden Triangle has a notorious history and the mystery lingers. Though one has to wonder that even in the bad old days, it may have just appeared as a sleepy backwater on the surface. I mean, even if you have drugs and smuggling and poppy farms, the vast majority of people just grow rice and buy chickens at the store and sleep in beds and drink beer on the front lawn.

When it's warm all year round all you really need is a hut.

My mission was to risk my neck at a five-star resort perched on a hillside within view of three countries and the great muddy Mekong river. My second time on the Mekong in one month. An odd thing to find myself saying.

Aside from braving excessive luxury and eating really good Italian food, I actually did risk my neck a bit. The special thing about this place was that they keep four big elephants on their acres of jungle hills, and for a price, guests can actually learn to be mahouts. Journalists can learn for free.

The actual mahout course takes ten days and there's even a driving test to pass, but the resort just gives you a taste of it on some very gentle elephants under the guidance of Thai mahouts. I think I'm going to have to go for the full license one of these days because it was a complete blast. I'm not really a horse person and I was not looking forward to a day on elephant-back aside from the novelty of it and the subsequent ability to say that I can drive an elephant.

We went and found our elephants where they were in the jungle, munching away at bamboo, then rode them back down to the elephant garage.

Elephants are not horses. If you take all the skin and muscle off an elephant and look at the shape of its bones, especially its feet, and if you're a good paleontologist or historical biologist, you'll notice that the feet are actually flippers that have turned back into legs. Elephants once lived in the oceans just like whales. Like whales they left the land one day, while everyone else was busy crawling out of the sea, and their feet turned to flippers and they developed clever ways of breathing air while 99.9% of their bodies were in water. For the elephant this meant a trunk. After a while the elephants decided they didn't like the sea so much and they crawled back out. Now they are actually standing like ballerinas on the ends of their flippers and they still like to completely submerge every so often.

Elephants live in grasslands alongside zebras and horses and ruminants and such, but their minds are those of whales. They're intelligent and playful and they still communicate over huge distances like whales by emitting subsonic sounds from the huge cavities in their skulls.

Up in the hills with a hilltribe. They may have been Hmong tribesmen formerly employed by the CIA in their secret war, but I really have no idea. Their village looked like a really nice place to live.

The lady elephant I was riding was 59 years old and she was hilarious. I climbed up without difficulty because I'm already tall and pretty much just like a big wiry monkey. The mahout had me hopping on and off a few times until he was satisfied with my technique. I learned a couple of mahout tricks where you tell the elephant to put her head down and you slide right down the front of her face to get off or hop up on her by vaulting off a foot and pulling on her ear, the mahout's equivalent of jumping into a convertible without opening the doors. After a long ride down the mountain where I learned all the words and movements to make the elephant go left right and backwards, I had a little test where I slalomed between posts without knocking them over.

I got it right the first time but he had me do it a bunch. By this time I was starting to communicate with my elephant. Suddenly it started to get difficult to make her do what I wanted. I realized she was getting bored with the game and was trying to see if I'd get annoyed. She really started cracking me up and I began to understand how intelligent she was. I harrassed her back and she took it good-naturedly and I got the feeling that she had fun with me. She dumped me off back at the hotel (nothing quite like driving up to a hotel entrance on an elephant) and went back to the jungle with the mahout. About 10 minutes later I realized I'd formed some kind of attachment, and I kind of missed her. I know I'm going to go back and do it again. Thailand's full of elephants and this course for foreigners is one way to keep the mahouts from using their elephants for illegal logging or worse, walking them into major cities to get money from tourists.

I can't tell you how much fun this was.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.