Swimming with...Elephants?!

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Travelling gives you the chance to do some pretty amazing things. The problem is, telling people about them makes you seem like a smug git. You definitely want to avoid being the sort of person who sets a Facebook status like 'Just off to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef...tough life...' You know, the kind of person who has about 3,000 bands on their wrists, a 4-inch beard and a t-shirt with 'Beer Lao' on it.

With that mind, I'll do my best not to sound to travellery (it's a word!) when I tell you a story from my time in Nepal.



The Chitwan National Park may boast some of the most verdant vegetation this side of the Cretaceous Period, but so far we’d found the lack of animals slightly disconcerting. Our safari guides had failed to get us excited at the prospect of some deer (“We get them in Richmond Park, mate”) and our encounter with a defecating rhino didn’t exactly make for the sort of pictures that you’ll look back on fondly in years gone by. Even the crocodiles (which according to our Nepalese and slightly sadistic friend Rimal have a hunger for the wild dogs that play in the river) were staying out of sight.



We weren’t exactly hoping for the Battle at Kruger (a legendary YouTube clip where lions, water buffalos and crocodiles all battle it out), but a little interaction with some wildlife would have been nice. Luckily, this was all about to change. We were going to go Elephant Bathing.



No, it wasn’t a trick by the locals to get us to do a task that they hated (Take Part in a Local Nepalese Custom – Sweeping the Dining Hall Floor!). It should be more correctly labelled ‘Elephant Swimming’, or perhaps ‘Elephant Frolicking’.



An elephant really is a magnificent creature. If you’ve ever seen one in zoo, you’re really not getting the whole picture. It’s only when you get close enough to touch, hear and even smell the animals that you get a true sense of their splendour. Gigantic but gentle, immensely strong but docile, elephants radiate a calm presence; somehow you can detect a sort of wisdom behind their eyes, a feeling of peace.



We scaled the elephant’s back like attackers into a besieged castle and seated ourselves precariously above his shoulders; sitting on an elephant while he slowly rises to his feet is rather like being on a bouncy castle as it’s being pumped up. Different parts of your body are rising at different rates, and then ‘Woah’; all of a sudden you’re atop the mightiest beast in the world and off to conquer Rome. Or so it feels like. Ahem.



Forget what I said about the elephants radiating a calm presence or gentle maturity; get them in water and they’re like bikini-clad students at a charity car wash, screaming and squirting water all over the place. The elephants have a mischievous sense of fun – one minute you’re enjoying the view, the next a stream of water is being ejected into your face. It was like a scene from a Marx Brothers film - real slapstick comedy.



It really was amazing entertainment – the elephant did its best to throw us about, roll us over and dunk us into the water. I couldn’t tell who was enjoying it more; us or the elephant. The only downside was that after weeks of avoiding drinking the local water, we were now being hurled, mouths agape, into a river filled with elephant shit.

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