Ban Ta Klang - The Elephant Village

We spent our last 2 weeks in Thailand at the “elephant village” of Ban Ta Klang in Surin Province.

We arrived in driving rain, a sign of the impending monsoon season, but luckily the flooded roads had dried out by the following morning when we had to drive 130 kms to cross into Cambodia & then back into Thailand to renew our tourist visas. This was one of the complications of travelling long-term. We had left the UK too far ahead to be able to get our visas there, but were unable to get long-stay Thai visas in Mumbai in May, as we had been led to believe. New Delhi would have been the place to do it back in February, if only we'd realised! (Subsequent visits to New Delhi had been on weekends & public holidays, of course.) So we spent a fruitless day in Mumbai & a long, expensive day in Thailand & Cambodia in pursuit of our visas – we had to pay for a car & driver to get to the border plus the cost of Cambodian visas, Thai visas & fines (more expensive at the border!) for overstaying our original visas. There were, of course, the compensations of getting extra stamps in our passports & a quick look at Cambodia before heading back to Ban Ta Klang & our planned elephant experience.

For hundreds of years elephants have been the focus of life for the Kui/Suaiy/Gui people (Thai words very often transliterate into English in several different ways - these are all variations we've read & heard of the same Thai word!) who live in the village. In the old days mahouts caught wild elephants in nearby Cambodia but the conflict in that country put a stop to the practice, not to mention modern conservation concerns. The trapping of wild elephants was made illegal 53 years ago, although there seem to be few wild elephants to worry about in the vicinity these days. Nowadays elephants are either bought in or bred from resident domestic elephants. Traditionally, elephants were trained at the owners' & mahouts' homes but now there is an elephant training center. There's also a museum & a show ground. Elephants are obviously not used for warfare any more & rarely used for work either, except in emergencies as in the Tsunami of 2004.

There are 180 elephants. Each elephant has a mahout, but each mahout does not necessarily own his own elephant. We stayed in the house of the head man, Mr. Pratik, who owns 9 elephants but does not ride them any more himself – he says he's too old at 43! That made us wonder what on earth we were doing there, particularly when he went on to say that all elephants are dangerous, temperamental & wild at heart! Mr Pratik is widely travelled as an international consultant on elephant behaviour. The Indian government has sought his advice about how to reduce the number of mahouts killed there annually. 200 die in India every year while in Ban Ta Klang there are usually only 2 – 3 killed each year. We were duly grateful to find that our allocated elephants (we had our own personal elephants & mahouts for the duration of our stay) were female (less dangerous than males) & that our mahouts were experienced, alert & armed. Nobody takes elephants for granted in the village. While they feel they have a special relationship with them, there's no sentimental pretence that elephants are harmless pets. With all this in mind, we had a go at riding our elephants! Fiona hated it & did it only once, but Howard enjoyed it – up to a point. Fiona breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the first week when he decided that it was enough already.

Apart from riding on their backs, we helped generally in looking after the elephants. They require exercise & bathing, not to mention needing a large amount of feeding! When weren't involved in elephant maintenance, we got around the local area by a variety of methods of transport - on the back of trailers, on buses, on bikes & on foot. We watched villagers working in the surrounding paddy fields & fishermen wading out into the River Mun, setting & checking their nets. We were shown the various stages involved in the production of silk which is the traditional occupation for the women of the village. Beautiful as the silk is, Fiona now feels that she can't wear it any more – her vegetarian principles would be compromised since we discovered that the live silk worms are boiled inside their cocoons during the process. (The boiled worms are either eaten by the spinners as they work or sold to restaurants for extra income.)

We also spent quite a few hours teaching English to local children, although we did refuse the “opportunity” to teach the whole secondary school on a day when most of the teachers were away on courses themselves! Being faced with a hall full of about 250 eleven to eighteen year-olds with no books, paper or blackboards – in fact, no aids of any kind – wasn't our idea of a sensible, practical or enjoyable experience for anyone concerned! A class of 30, or even 40, was a reasonable proposition since the pupils were all extremely well-behaved. They were less sophisticated & more child-like than western teenagers, which meant that we could put our well-rehearsed primary school routines into action! As with India, we were struck by how much education is dominated by rote learning but they seemed to enjoy the chance to take part in more relaxed participative learning, once they'd got over their surprise & shyness at our methods!

We were made to feel very welcome during our whole stay & we had mixed feelings when the time came to leave – but pleasure at the thought of getting back to Scotland, if only for a few days, won the day! To see our families & to escape the overwhelming heat & humidity was a wonderful prospect.