Chiang Mai Day Two: Elephants

This is day two of Arie's trip to Chiang Mai. You may want to start at day one.

I hate organized tours. I hate being shoved into a minivan with a bunch of strangers and forced to go see things according to some pre-determined itinerary. I hate signing up for a cool-sounding tour and then having them stop at horrid tourist traps along the way (like when I took a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels in Viet Nam and they made us walk through a lacquer factory and gift shop on the way). Instead of tours, I now rent taxis and have them take me to the attractions. I decide my own schedule, I don't have to go to random craft factories, it's cheaper, and there aren't random strangers in the car with me unless I invite them.

That's how I ended up in a taxi on the way to Maesa Elephant Camp. Maesa (or Mae Sa, unclear) is a large elephant camp a few miles outside Chiang Mai that houses seventy elephants. Standing outside the camp were two adolescent elephants, and we fed them some bananas and took a lot of photos. We bought admission tickets for the camp and for the elephant show, for which we were just in time. We decided not to take any elephant rides because they make you sit in a basket, and we were only interested if you can sit directly on the elephant (you can, but only if you take their day-long mahout training course (I was tempted)).

The show was starting soon, so we hurried straight to the outdoor theater and managed to snag front-row seats. The elephant show was probably the best show I have ever seen. It started with an entrance parade (with elephants holding a "Welcome to Maesa" sign in their trunks).

The next demonstration was how mahouts get on and off elephants. It started with the mahouts climbing up and down the normal way, but then the elephants started cocking their legs to give the mahouts a step. Finally, the elephants lifted the mahouts with their heads and threw them onto their backs. After that came a demonstration of how elephants sleep, which meant that the elephants all laid down on the ground and didn't move for a while.

What followed was the single greatest thing I have ever seen. Billed as "Elephant Musicians", about a dozen elephants came out in a line, each blasting away at a harmonica held in the trunk. The elephants were clearly having a lot of fun marching around blaring on their harmonicas (all in the same key, thankfully) and stomping in time. At a predetermined signal, they all began to swing their trunks in circles while continuing to play and stomp. It was amazing, and this description does not do it justice.

The elephant band was the highlight of the show, but there were some other quality bits. The next event was Elephant Football (Soccer). At first the elephants just kicked a soccer ball into an unguarded goal (and missed a lot, but give them a break, they're elephants). But then another elephant came out to play goalie. The keeper elephant started bending at the knee and smacking his trunk on the ground to taunt the elephants who were going to take shots. Then the elephants took a few shots, and, surprisingly, the elephant goalie was able to deflect most of them. However, the show took a dark turn when the goalie elephant turned to the crowd to take a bow; one of the other elephants picked up the ball with his trunk and drop-kicked it into the unguarded goal. This taught us an important lesson about elephants: They are cheaters.

Next came elephant painting. The mahouts set up canvases and the elephants carried out their art supply boxes in their trunks. The mahout would dip the paintbrush and put it in the elephant's trunk, and then the elephant would paint a few strokes. I had thought that all animal art was basically abstract blobs of color, but these elephants painted some fairly nice pictures of trees and flowers. One even painted a decent outline of an elephant. I would have thought that the mahouts would guide the strokes, but they were very hands-off, only switching paintbrushes at the appropriate time. The elephants had even been trained to stop from time to time and hold up the brush while they examined their work. When their work was done, they bowed and then carried their supplies offstage.

Next came a stick race, where one of the elephants cheated when it became clear that he had no chance (really, they have no sense of sportsmanship). After that, an elephant went up against some guy from the audience in a dart-throwing contest. The guy won, but we all booed him. The last event was a lumber exhibition, where the elephants dragged some logs around. Normally, watching elephants drag lumber would be entertaining, but not after the wonder that was the elephant ragtime band (shown here). Finally, the elephants paraded again with a sign thanking us for coming.

This is where not being on a tour really paid off. The camp cleared out when the show ended because the tours don't stick around afterwards. But we had noticed that the map on the back of the program marked an area as "elephant nursery". Beeline. The nursery was almost empty, only a few other visitors had wandered over.

All nurseries should be elephant nurseries. We spent a good hour or so feeding baby elephants bananas and sugarcane, stroking their adorable baby trunks and ears, and taking photos of us sitting on them (baby elephants are six feet tall) and watching them do tricks. Baby elephants love sugarcane. Do not try to deny them sugarcane, for their trunks are deceptively strong. I know from experience.

The young elephants were trained to do some simple tricks, like putting hats on people, and it was adorable. They also knew how to pose for photos, and whenever a person would stand next to them, they would immediately wave their trunk around or grab the person with their trunks. They were also trained to ask for payment for their services, which came in the form of 20 baht notes (fifty cents). When paid, they would hold the money to their heads in a traditional gesture of thanks, and then the mahout would pocket it.

When we had had enough of baby elephants (which takes a long time), we bought some elephant paintings, and then, sadly, moved on from the elephant camp. It was probably the highlight of my vacation, and my only regret is passing on mahout training.

The rest of the day paled in comparison. Our next stop was an orchid farm, which looked from the start like a bit of a tourist trap. We were hungry, the entrance fee was 40 baht ($1), and their lunch buffet was 160 baht each. Fortunately, across the street was a Thai restaurant that had delicious noodle soup (total for five people: 120 baht). Sure enough, once we got into the orchid farm, we discovered that it was in fact another tourist trap. There were seven or eight rows of orchids, a butterfly room, a well-apportioned gift shop, and a giant restaurant. It was, in fact, a restaurant with some orchids outside.

The butterfly room was lame. When I think of butterfly rooms, I think of the one at the Bronx Zoo in New York, which has approximately one million butterflies per square foot. I'm not especially crazy about butterflies, but it's kind of fun to be in a room where you can't see because the air is so thick with butterflies. That's what I expected. That's not what I got. The butterfly room had maybe four butterflies, and they were all flying up at the corner of the room trying to escape. There was one other butterfly, but it was dead. There was one monarch butterfly perched on a flower, and an employee was there to point it out to us ("Welcome to the butterfly room. The butterfly is over there.").

They did have a rather nice gift shop, I guess. One of the things about running an orchid farm is that you have a lot of orchids, and so they've come up with some sort of process to varnish and dust them in gold to make jewelry. I don't really like jewelry, but everyone else loved it.

We then asked our driver to take us to a small town outside Chiang Mai that has been a center for umbrella production for centuries. He misunderstood (possibly deliberately) and took us to a silver factory with a rather large gift shop, but we refused to go in and so he took us to the umbrella town. It was interesting to see the traditional method of making umbrellas (which apparently includes a staple gun), but not that interesting. We didn't buy any.

Our last stop was a town of weavers. Lonely Planet claimed there was an area where you could walk through silk weaving factories, and sure enough, we walked through a small wooden building filled with people weaving on old-fashioned hand looms. It was almost certainly a tourist-related construct; next door we saw the actual weaving factory, and it was a lot more like what we had expected--brightly lit, lots of women sitting at tables, machinery in the background.

We had some trouble finding a restaurant for dinner because a lot of places take three days off for New Year's. Sigh.

Continue to day three.