step up high on the elephant

“Step Up High on the Elephant's Trunk”: A Day in the Life of a Resort Brochure Model

Life in Kathmandu is endlessly surprising. Just as I was bemoaning not being able to accompany friends on a weekend rafting trip because lingering fatigue from food poisoning, another friend called up suggesting that I join an all-expense paid trip to Royal Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal. The conditions of the trip were simple: I had to be ready to go at 7:00 the next morning, and I had to be willing to have my photo included in a resort brochure. To get compliant models for the brochure, the travel company of a friend-of-a-friend was sponsoring our entire weekend - food, transportation and drinks included - at its two jungle resorts.

While Chitwan is less than 200 km south of Kathmandu, the drive in an air-conditioned van required the entire day as we bounced over potholed and eroded roads, and waited at army checkpoints. Reading was impossible in the van, so the choice form of entertainment was a variant of Twenty Questions, in which each participant had to guess the name of the famous person written on a scrap of paper stuck to their forehead. This was especially amusing when we inadvertently walked into Nepali shops with the scraps of paper still stuck to our foreheads.

Upon reaching Machan, a plush yet rustic resort on the border of the park, we were loaded onto elephants for a safari. Each elephant carried four passengers on a small platform on its back, plus an elephant driver (mahout) who used sticks and verbal commands to direct the elephant. As we discovered the next day during a Land Rover safari, riding on the back of an elephant is the ideal way to explore the jungle. Elephants can easily step over and around obstacles that require a lot of tense maneuvering from a Land Rover, they never get stuck in the mud, they walk with a gently rolling gait that is much more comfortable that the jostling of the Land Rover, and they are cute to boot!

Back at camp, it was time for drinks in the setting sun. We bellied up to the outdoor bar, holding the resort's most colorful concoctions, while tilting our heads at funny angles to simulate unselfconscious conversation. In the glare of the photographer's strobe lights, we tried to look as natural as possible.

My first assignment the next day was to lounge in the hammock, chatting with my friends as they floated in the pool. I began to see why models get the big bucks! The poolside languor couldn't last long - the baby elephant awaited its bath.

Still in our swimsuits, we met the baby and its mother riverside to help wet them down against the searing sun. Only three months old, the baby was already over four feet high at the shoulder. Its proportions were different from its mother: with a short, humped back covered with black bristles, it looked more like a mastodon than a modern Indian elephant. It stayed out of the sun by standing in the shadow of its mother's belly.

As we approached the elephants, I commented to the resort naturalist that the mahout's way of climbing onto the elephant via its trunk looked like fun. Moments later, he was instructing me to step as high as I could on the elephant's bent trunk, whereby the elephant would raise her trunk, pushing me up her forehead and onto her neck. Climbing elephants is not too dissimilar to climbing rocks, and after a little squirming, I found myself astride the elephant with my feet tucked securely behind her ears, one of my favorite moments of my time in Nepal. From the ground, the mahout directed her to walk into the river, and then to lie down in the water, allowing me to slide off. We scrubbed the elephants' rough skin, and took innumerable pictures of the baby, as the photographer documented our tropical fun.

While Machan is smooth-running and well-established, another resort had just changed hands, and the travel company is in the process of renovating it. We piled back into the van for the two-hour drive to the other, as yet nameless, resort at the far end of the park. The nameless resort's Indian designers had an unfortunate lack of taste and disconnection to the local landscape. While Machan was all wood and thatch, decorated with artifacts from the local culture, the nameless resort appeared to have been transplanted from some suburban nightmare. The main building, with its soaring two-storey ceiling and randomly placed stained glass, resembled a modern Evangelical Christian meeting hall, while the duplex style lodgings of light peach stucco would have looked completely at home on a golf-course in southern California.

After lunch in the cavernous main room, we set out for the park in a Land Rover. Entering the park required crossing a heavily fortified bridge. After some discussion, the driver convinced the soldiers that a car full of foreigners could not be harboring Maoists. The first stop was a crocodile conservation center, where dozens of gharials sunned themselves, mouths open thirty degrees for any unwary prey passing by. Gharials are much smaller than American alligators, but with their long snouts displaying curved incisors, you still wouldn't want to meet one in a murky river. One of our group took a few uncautious steps into a gharial enclosure, and immediately felt their wrath, as they charged toward him, tails thrashing.

In an open tall-grass savannah, reminiscent of the Everglades, we came upon tree after tree full of long-legged white storks. The storks would periodically rise on their toes and stretch out their endless wings before disappearing into the blue sky. Deeper in the jungle, we spotted a deep grey rhino crossing the river looking like a heavily fortified, animatronic tank. The unpadded roof rack of the Land Rover was not nearly as comfortable as the elephants' backs, and no one was too disappointed when we had to clambered down so that the driver could dig the Rover out of a mud pit.

After the obligatory dinner, hammock-lounging and bird-watching shots (the bar at this lodge was not yet stocked and functioning, much to the disappointment of gin-and-tonic afficianados), we piled into the van the next morning to resume our inexhaustible game of Twenty Questions, reaching Kathmandu by dusk.

Pictures.