roganjosh

I had a great time in Chiang Mai, mainly because I ended up staying in a really fun hostel. Lots of trips were organised, lots of bottles of Singha were drunk! Anyway, life was starting to get a bit too comfortable, so after I’d extended my stay for third time I resolved to actually head off and go somewhere new. Browsing around a few websites it turned out that the King’s cup international elephant polo championship was due to start in Chiang Rai at the end of March, and it sounded sufficiently daft for me to want to check out!

As it turned out they didn’t mean the city of Chiang Rai, which would have been relatively easy to get to, but rather the region or Chiang Rai, and more specifically the Golden Triangle right up in the north on the border of Myanmar and Laos. This meant an early morning start to catch a rickety, and non-air-conditioned local bus for the 5 hour journey up to Chiang Saen. That got me to the closest town from which I took a cruise along the Mekong river the next morning (with a brief touristy stop in a Laos to send a few postcards) up to Sop Ruak, and the Golden Triangle. The triangle is the center of the former opium fields grown in the three countries, but production has fallen sharply in the last couple of decades reducing the only remnants of opium to the Opium House Museum. The exhibitions there stressed the cultural and historic uses of opium so much I was surprised you couldn’t buy any in the shop at the end! Maybe you could, if you asked the right person…

Anyway, from Sop Ruak I was just a confused walk, followed by a lift on a scooter away from the elephant polo, that was being held at the Anantara resort. The resort is incredibly plush, as you would expect from a hotel that is going to be housing some very posh polo players. One night at the Anantara would cost more than the amount I’ll spend on food and accodomodation in three weeks in Thailand! (I’m not including booze). I arrived in time for the opening parade and was greeted almost immediately by a marching band playing “The Final Countdown”! In front of them thai dancers and another band of drummers were stationed, and bringing up the rear were the elephants!

There were a lot of them, since in Elephant polo each elephant only plays one of the 7 minute chukas (of which there are two in each match). They were all provided by the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre, the charity that the event was supporting. Last year they raised enough money to supply them with an elephant ambulance (a truck) and after the parade down to the pitch all the dancers, bands and elephants lined up for the handover of the keys.

Now, I’d never seen elephant polo before and I have to admit in my head I was expecting it to be ridiculous. Elephants are huge, and putting guys on top of them with very long sticks and then having them all charge around trying to hit a tiny ball seemed absurd. The exhibition match that afternoon though was between two teams of the best players, all of them experienced horse polo players, and it was incredible to watch! The elephants were surprisingly nimble, and their mahouts had them spinning and charging around the pitch like football players! The polo guys were equally impressive, able to hit a polo ball with a two metre long stick dead-on from on top of a moving elephant! There were chips, lobs, huge strikes, shots from between elephants’ legs - it was end to end stuff! Those guys were the best though, and the next day I went back to see the first two matches of the actual championship. In the first match a team of novices were stuffed by the pros 14-4, and the 4 goals had been awarded to them at the start of the game to help out. With less experienced players elephant polo is indeed absurd, and becomes a bit more like elephant rugby, as the massive beasts form a scrum over the ball and the humans desperately wave their sticks around! The second game was much the same, but ended in a 1-1 draw. Even so it was excellent fun to stand on the banks of the Mekong, G&T in hand watching elephants charge around and enjoy themselves.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 4:28 am and is filed under travelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.