Along with riding the elephants and feeding them bamboo, part of the elephant care is bathing the elephants.  Sounds simple enough, where’s the hose?  Not quite.   The elephants love the water, so when they see the lake, they just go for it…and the walk right into it no matter how loud you shout stop. [Ed. note: maybe if you shouted “how”, the command for stop…]  So that is how we ended up riding an elephant fully clothed into a dirty Thai lake…twice.

The mahouts are used to this, they know how to stand up on the elephant’s back and balance so only their feet get wet.   But they get great entertainment on commanding the elephant to basically lie down underwater so the silly tourists get dunked.  Over and over again.  And if you aren’t cooperating by helping to scrub the elephant’s skin, it will get grumpy and pull it’s trunk up to try to shoot water your way.

The second bath time, my mahout got off the elephant before we were near the water and suddenly it was Wan Dee and me, alone in the lake.   He wasn’t listening to my commands (but he hadn’t yet, so why start now…), and my husband, who was safely guarded by his mahout on back of his elephant, was making things worse by shouting out the command to lay down in an attempt to dunk me. [Ed. note: If you can’t get an elephant to dunk your wife in a lake in the middle of the Thailand jungle, when can you dunk you wife?] And then the elephant got grumpy because no one was washing its back–what the mahout normally does when he is standing there.   So I had to turn myself around on the elephant and scrub.   And just as quickly as we went into the water, Wan Dee decided to be done with bath time and started trotting out of the water…with me still backwards and unable to reach the ears to hold onto.

I don’t think this was the type of mud bath most spas wanted you to pay hundreds for…