When Denise O’Donnell reopens her Café Origins vegetarian restaurant in Jim Thorpe sometime in May, there is likely to be a new item on the menu—Pad Thai, Thailand’s traditional dish made with egg, rice noodles, mushrooms, onions, herbs and seasonings, and served with a chili sauce on top.
And she might just be wearing two souvenirs from Thailand: a Buddha pendant that signifies prosperity, and a black, white and red checkered sash that signifies she is a mahout—an elephant keeper.
The pendant was the gift of Fai Tuchinda, an exchange student from Thailand that two years ago stayed in the home of neighbors Carole and Ben Walbert. O’Donnell and Tuchinda became friends and her family invited her to visit them in Thailand.
O’Donnell just returned from her visit to Thailand. There, she toured the old city and the new city of Bangkok with the Tuchinda family, then visited surrounding provinces, temple ruins, floating markets, and outdoor markets.
But the focus of O’Donnell’s visit was a four-day stay at the Maesa Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, where she trained to become a mahout.
After a tour of the camp, O’Donnell was taken into the jungle ands introduced to Mainoi, her six and a half foot tall, 47-year-old elephant. For the next three days, each morning at 6:30 a.m., she went into the jungle where Mainoi slept, bring her to the camp, feed her, shower her, and begin their day of training to develop their relationship as mahout and elephant.
Mainoi might eat five of six meals a day with a diet of “at least 25 pounds of sticky rice, bamboo, bananas and grass,” O’Donnell guesstimated.
“Because every day, it was about 100 degrees, we’d take leisurely walks along the river to the waterfalls where I’d cool her off in the river,” she said. “To keep her cool, we walked her through the river a lot.”
O’Donnell’s had to learn to mount, guide and care for her elephant. “The challenge was to get up on the elephant they way they do,” explained O’Donnell. “The elephant won’t bend down. They can lift you by their trunk, but they prefer you get on the way all the mahouts do: by holding onto the ear, kicking the leg gently, and placing your foot on a leg. The elephant will raise a leg for you, and then you have to straddle the elephant.”
Once upon Mainoi, O’Donnell found herself sitting on the elephant’s bare neck, without a saddle, six a half feet off the ground. “You put your feet behind the elephant’s ear, and hold your hands either in front on the elephant’s head or behind you on the elephant’s back,” she advised. “There is nothing to support you or to hold on. It’s awkward when you first go up, but you have to trust your elephant to keep you safe.”
Now it was time to begin to learn to work as a team, and for O’Donnell to learn her first Thai words—since Thai was the only language that Mainoi understood. Fortunately, only three words were required: “bie” – to go, “ben” – to turn, and “how” – to stop.
Other than that, riding a Thai elephant isn’t much different from Western reining a horse. To go forward, tap both feet on their side and say, “Bie.” To stop, tap both heels on the side of the elephant and say “How.” To turn left, tap the elephant under the right ear with a foot and say “Ben.” To go right, tap under the left ear and say “Ben.”
At the Maesa Elephant Camp, several of the elephants have been trained to express their artistic bent through painting. They are taught to hold a paintbrush in their trunk and follow the direction of a mahout’s finger across a canvass.
She was assigned an eight-year-old elephant for this training. “Elephants have a lot of dexterity in their trunks,” explained O’Donnell. “Asian elephants have a finger at the tip on the top of their trunks.”
“To get it to paint, I moved my finger along the canvas, and the elephant would watch,” O’Donnell said. “Then I dipped the paintbrush in paint and put it in the elephant’s trunk. It grabbed it with its finger, followed my directions, and painted a bouquet of flowers.” The Maesa Elephant Camp is listed in Ripley's Believe It Or Not and has a record in the Guinness World Records.
Elephants are separated at three or four years old to go with a mahout to be trained. The elephant and mahout spend 24 hours a day together for several months, and thereafter spend 12 hours a day together for ten or fifteen years.
Once, the elephants were used to move logs and to fight battles. Today, they are protected. At the Maesa Elephant Camp, they give rides to tourists and put on exhibitions. In Thailand, March 13 is Elephant’s Day, where the elephants feast and do no work.
“The relationship a mahout has with an elephant is that of a family member,” explained O’Donnell. “They develop mutual respect an are dependent upon one another.”
Mahout O’Donnell plans to return to her elephants next year. Some day, she would like to buy a house near the elephant camp so that she can visit more frequently—to do what a mahout must do—be an elephant keeper.
