Sorry readers–when last I tried to post got into technical difficulties.
Some years ago, my husband and I went to the Gaida Wildlife Camp in southern Nepal. The terai is the name given to Nepal’s southern plains that are very close to India. One section of Gaida serves as an elephant R&R station where working females come to chill for a few months. (The rest of the year they haul teak and other heavy burdens.)
Gaida Wildlife Camp, Royal Chitwan National Park
Our guide took us to the corral to meet the six resident lady pachyderms and their mahouts, the men who look after them. The mahouts were busily preparing elephant “M & Ms.”—large leaf-wrapped packages of dense nutrients including enormous vitamin pills. An elephant in the wild eats between 200-400 pounds of vegetation a day depending on its size and how active it is, so the packages served as elephant Ensure to help the girls regain their strength.
We tossed the packages to the elephants who snarffled them up with their trunks.
Gobble, gobble
Then a mahout demonstrated how to get onto an elephant via the animal’s uplifted foot which transported him upwards like a living elevator. Once at forehead level, he gracefully stepped to the elephant’s head, turned around and sat behind her ears.
“Now it’s your turn,” he announced. “Who will try?”More guts than brains, I volunteered. Up went the foot but when I got as high as the elephant’s eye, panic struck.
“Climb up to her head,” the mahout directed I was so frozen, it took what seemed like an hour to inch my way over her broad forehead. Finally, I made it but ended up face to face with the mahout instead of behind him. Slowly, I maneuvered until—eureka– I was seated where I was supposed to be. The whole episode was a hoot for the audience below and it’s too bad it wasn’t videoed. Would have been pretty funny on YouTube.
Then four of us rode another elephant seated in a wooden howdah 
strapped onto her back. Thrilled with the day’s events, of course I signed up for a solo elephant ride the next morning and this is what transpired:
“Not to worry, Mem Sahib,” the mahout said. “No problem, positive.”
I wasn’t quite as positive as we were sitting on an elephant’s back at five a.m. in southern Nepal’s Royal Chitwan National Park and the ground was a long way down. My only other elephant ride had been the day before with three other visitors where we’d been securely packed into a howdah, a wooden seat a bit like a baby stroller minus wheels. This morning there was no howdah, only a flimsy rope tied behind the enormous, flapping ears of Sana, my elephant.
“Put legs under rope,” said the mahout, demonstrating. I did my best to comply, figuring that this man, who had cared for Sana since she was born and would be with her until either she or he died, knew what he was doing.
Sana’s back was broad as a tabletop and her gait relatively smooth for such an enormous animal; however, the rub of her wirery hair against my legs made me regret wearing shorts.
We walked into the jungle. Whenever a branch threatened to smack me, the mahout spoke softly to the elephant who responded either by uprooting the entire tree or stepping neatly on the offending shoot. The sun rose, heralding a hot day ahead. Birds screeched, monkeys swung on vines and deer browsed in the tall grass. After a while, I relaxed.
Then we arrived at a small pond where a rhinoceros was enjoying a morning drink. The mahout urged Sana forward.
Rhino having a drink
“Please go back,” I said.
The mahout laughed and urged Sana into the pond. The old joke, “How to you stop a rhinoceros from charging? Take away his credit card,” flashed through my mind. We moved closer to the rhino who gave us what I interpreted as a calculating look. What were the chances of ending my days in the Nepalese jungle? Would my obituary begin: ‘New York City woman killed by charging rhino…?’
“Please, we have to turn around,” I begged.
Again, the mahout laughed.
“Not to worry,” he said, apparently his stock phrase for on-the-verge- of- meltdown tourists. I was miles past worry. One of us was the irresistible force; the other, the immovable object. Something had to give and I was strongly in favor of it being Sana with me and the mahout on board.
By the time Sana and the rhino were fifty feet apart I was frantic. A nasty run-in seemed inevitable and the mahout either didn’t understand me or had a death wish. Then the rhino yielded, lumbering out of the water, up the bank and into the trees.
“See missy, rhino knows elephant is bigger. No problem.”
My breath returned. Clearly, this man understood the subtleties of elephant/rhinoceros confrontations and had probably played the same joke on other unsuspecting visitors. We were heading back to camp where I’d have a great story to share at breakfast. I patted Sana who responded by grabbing a sapling and stuffing the entire thing into her mouth.
No recipe folks–chewed sapling doesn’t cut it and Nepali food is pretty close to Indian, a cuisine I love but tend to enjoy in restaurants. Happy trails!