Who would have thought that you could actually learn to be an Elephant Driver (Mahout).. and what better place than the "land of a million elephants", Laos, to do it.
Our 1 day mahout training started with a short drive to the Elephant Village camp. Our guide gave us some information about the organization, elephants, and Laos. Here are some of the interesting facts that stuck:
- Laos is known as "the land of a million elephants", however no more than 1800 elephants now remain in Laos and of those, no more than 300 of those elephants are wild
- An elephant costs approx. $15,000 USD, and they eat around 500 pounds of food per day
- Elephant owners who want to mate their female elephant with a male, must pay about $7,500 USD
- The gestation period of an elephant is around 24 months
- 90% of Laotians can speak Thai - they learned it because most of their TV channels come from Thailand.
While waiting for our training to start, we sipped coffee and tea right next to 2 grazing elephants. We got to get close to the elephants, talk to them, feed them, and even touch them… let's say that Jen was in heaven.
Before riding the elephant, we first had to learn the Lao commands and movements that the elephants have been trained to understand. We only had 6 key commands to remember, but once on the elephant, you seem to forget them really quickly. Luckily, we cleverly wrote them in our hands just incase! ;)
Here are the commands we learned:
- Pai Pai - Go Forward
- Haow - Stop
- Doon Doon - Go Backward
- Sai Sai - Turn Left
- Kwa Kwa - Turn Right
- Seung Seung - Lift right knee (so the mahout can climb onto the elephant)
- Map Map - Kneel down onto knees (so the riders can climb onto the elephant)
- Kop Chai Lye Lye - Thank the elephant
- Boon - Shower your back with water
After doing a trial run at driving, we quickly noticed that the elephants are pretty stubborn and prefer to obey their real trainers. So.. it really turns out that we were more controlling the trainers than the elephant directly - we'd say the command and if it doesn't work (which is most of the time), the elephant's real trainer would repeat our commands to the elephant… resulting in a little more success :)
Following the test drive, we took our elephants for a walk through the nearby river to practice what we had learned.
The best part of the training was bathing and playing in the water with the elephants. The mahouts gave commands to tell the elephants to spray water on their backs using their trunks, while we brushed their heads clean. They also let us stand up and jump into the water from the elephant's heads…. Jen was a natural.
Lastly, just to make the tour a bit more complete, they brought us to the Tad Sae waterfall where we spent 1 hour exploring. It was a nice side-trip, though we would have preferred to spend more time with the elephants :(... but elephants have to spend time in the forest being elephants….bye bye Dumbo!
