Ele-fantastic!

Thankfully it was a bit of a lay in for us this morning, and we slept soundly until the alarm went off at 8:30am. This gave us enough time to pop and have some dosas for breakfast before heading out for the day.

Today is a break from touring bits of rubble and looking at stone slabs as we have booked in to see an elephant sanctuary where we can meet, feed, paint and wash elephants.  The elephant village is some way outside Jaipur so we had the traditional journey through the hectic roads, which were more reminiscent of Delhi, than Agra. I will try and describe them to you, to give you a flavour. Imagine a road as wide as the M25, throw in the following obstacles: cows (commonplace), goats, pigs, camels, people on push bikes, people on trikes with trailers, tuk-tuks, motorbikes, cars, buses, lorries, people walking in the road and people with wheelbarrows full of random stuff. One man was even wheeling a bike with lots of 30 foot long steel pipes in the middle of the road! There is no lane order at all, the slowest people can be in the outside lane or in the middle of the road, slowing everyone down, they don't seem to care, it is just part of the way of life here. All in all, it makes for a very entertaining journey, as you never know what you are going to come across on a drive around the city. 

I will say it again though, our regular driver it nothing short of amazing, he not only knows where to go in every city we have been to so far, he is a genius at driving these roads without getting into any bumps or scrapes (touch wood!). In short, he is the calm in the eye of a hurricane, or the oasis in a desert of chaos!

Anyway, I digress. Back to Elephantastic. The man who runs the place is called Rahul, and he is clearly passionate about his elephants. The elephant we were assigned was called Chanchal, which is either Hindi or Sanskrit for "Mischievous". Rahul told us that until three years ago, she was in a circus but they rescued her from that life and at the moment she is 12 months pregnant, so it seems like the future is a lot rosier for her than it was, even if she is completely blind in one eye, and has a cataract on the other (which they said they will sort out soon, so she can have partial sight again).

We started off the day by learning how to prepared food for her, and her owner (a mahout whose name I have shamefully forgotten) gave us a few keywords so that she knew we were friends. We were taught to prepare her food in nice little bundles all neatly tied together, and I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to have a trunk come and search you out to find its little food parcel!! "Lay" is the word we used to get Chanchal to take the food we had prepared for her, and "Dhar" is the word to get her to eat it!

Sarah making food parcels for Chanchal, under the guidance of the mahout

The food parcel met with Chanchal's approval

Being blind has dimmed Chanchal's personality at all, she is quite cheeky. If she felt that we had not given her a big enough in her parcel of food, her trunk would snake back to us as if to ask for a bit more (Sarah was a lot stingier with her food parcels than I was :P)!!

After feeding Chanchal and establishing a bond of trust, we were then allowed to paint her however we saw fit. The mahout explained that the paints were all water based and natural, so we were reassured that we were not slapping any Dulux on her at all. At first we were tentative with painting an elephant, but soon enough we gained a bit of confidence and were happily covering poor Chanchal with all sorts of colours and words. 

Sarah opted for pretty flowers, while I was a lot more factual with my painting, putting our names, location and the year on her body! Although for an added bit of randomness, I decided to draw the 1980s children's TV show character Wizbit on her side too.  Following the painting we got to walk our elephant and give them a drink, which Sarah loved doing, and then we got to hose her down and wash all the paint off of her body, which inevitably got us a bit wet!!

Sarah's paintings on Chanchal were very decorative!

My graffiti was more fact based.....

....although Wizbit made an appearance (for some reason!)

Then the mahout asked me to grip Chanchal's ears from the front really tightly and put my foot on her trunk. Before I knew it, I was being elevated into the air and planted on her head, albeit with a bit of panicked scrambling on my part. It was awesome to see just how powerful this magnificent creature was, as she lifted my ample frame as she would a twig!

We obviously did a rubbish job of hosing Chanchal that she had to do it herself!

There I was sitting on an elephant and I could see exactly what was going to happen next......Sarah was feeding water to Chanchal's trunk and with a swift arch of the said trunk I was blasted with water (much to my lovely wife's amusement!!!). I was sopping, but thankfully the weather is 39 degrees, so I didn't mind too much. Then it was Sarah's turn to climb on board. She was reluctant knowing that karma was about to balance itself rather quickly, but she climbed up the trunk gracefully ;) and sat at the front, astride Chanchal's neck. Now I had protection from being sprayed!! :D

Me getting hosed down!!

The aftermath which Sarah found very funny!

We both got a good hosing of water and elephant snot, and didn't have any clean clothes in which to change, but we didn't really mind that as we were just enjoying our time with the elephants. The plan after this was to go on a ride with the elephants, but to be honest neither Sarah's or my back would have been able to cope with being buffeted around on an elephant for an hour or so, so we reluctantly had to decline this offer and cut short our visit.

Sarah, gracefully mounting Chanchal and about to get soaked. Karma!

Anyway, that is our day with the Elephants, and all the excitement has worn little Sarah Bear out, because as I am writing this, she is sound asleep next to me. Tomorrow is a day of touring Jaipur, before heading out on the road towards Jodhpur, where I am hoping I will be able to buy a decent pair of riding trousers!