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HOW TO SLEEP WITH AN ELEPHANT
Like most accidental situations this started harmlessly enough, with that dreaded of all things “a quite drink”. The recipe is as follows , take two aussie’s far from home, add a thai bar in the party town of Patong on Phuket Island, and several drinks and the night goes something like this…..
Myself and the australian crayfish fisherman ;who’s name totally escape’s me now, started out by having a couple of “ quiet drinks “ at a bar on Patong’s infamous Bangla Rd , we met like most short term acquaintances in Thailand , it’s an occupational habit if you travel to Asia, at the end of the day you cant help but drift into one of the numerous bars in search of some-one to have a chat to and pass the time, if your really lucky they’ll even speak your own language. Well I met, we’ll call him Chris, I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s actually his name but the nights merriment blurs the smaller details.
So here we are two aussie’s far from home, one residing in Thailand for the duration and the other on his last night having spent a glorious three weeks wandering around Thailand seeing the sites, the drinks flow as does the conversation and somewhere around the 11.30 pm mark after having been drinking fairly steadily for the last 4hrs or so, Chris decides that he cant possibly return to Australia without thanking in person the guy that hosted most of his time in Phuket Island , some ex-pat that had put him up for the first couple of weeks in the country, stupidly I asked where this bloke lived and Chris, already well into his cups gives the dreaded statement…… “I don’t know the address but I can show you where it is “……
I should’ve known then but I ignored the crawling sensation up my spine and shrugged it of as too much Mekong whiskey. In any normal country this probably wouldn’t be to much of a problem, but this is Thailand and street signage is certainly not one of the government priorities, two thirds of the country live up little dirt roads that just don’t have a name and if they do they sure as hell don’t stick a sign up for the thousands of falangs wandering the country in various stages of inebriation.
Anyway for some reason this seemed to be a great idea , yeh lets go and say goodbye to this bloke and feeling magnanimous I offered to pilot the motorbike while chris gave directions , the words bloody stupid pop straight into my head now, but at the time, full of Thailand’s cheapest whiskey , it all made great sense.
We stagger from the bar and after a short search locate the 100cc Honda that that has been deliberately hiding from us, because even the motorbike knows this is a doomed venture, and on we climb, both of us completely shitfaced and oblivious to the dangers off we go, so now draw the picture in your head, two drunken 100kg aussie’s, one small Honda and way way to much Mekong whiskey……
How do I accurately convey the complete hopelessness of the following 2hrs , chris , who, at this time is only just capable of speech is giving directions like he actually knows where the hell he’s going and me? I’m well pissed enough to follow them, so it’s into the hills that surround Patong we ride, adventurers that’s us! Rebels without a fucking clue, turn after turn in the dark is taken, occasionally stopping so as chris can consult his memory …the same memory that is gasping for air as it drowns in the afore-mentioned Thai whiskey, its now becoming fairly obvious, even to us, that his mate doesn’t live in the rubber plantation that we’re currently riding thru and all signs of life have been absent for some time now …..bugger we’re lost…….so being good aussie’s we stop and have a smoke and think about it, the brilliant conclusion we come to is to find some-one and ask for directions, like this is really going to help, so off we go weaving drunkenly thru the pitch black along this goat track that in some-ones mind doubles as a road, we crest a hill and salvation is ahead, lights! Ya-hoo, we pull into this small shanty town consisting of about a half a dozen shacks, pick the one with the most activity and wander in; Ever see one of those spaghetti westerns when the lone cowboy wanders into a bar and all goes quiet? That’s the response we get, when, still pissed as nits, we make our entrance. Silence! All the talk stops and the entire bar just stares at us, and rightly so too! The chances of two drunken white guys wandering into this particular bar are fairly slim to say the least, chris still hell bent on saying goodbye to his host proceeds to try and get directions to a place that he doesn’t no the address of, from a bloke who doesn’t speak English, in a place that even the locals would have a hard time finding. The conversation that followed was, even to the locals at the bar, bloody funny and eventually one of them in broken English asks if we want a drink, hell its just what we need isn’t it! So here we are, wherever the hell that is, drunk and getting drunker, it turns out that the bloke who offered the drink is an elephant Mahout (handler for all you who didn’t know) and dam proud of his job he is, several drinks ensued and it’s suggested that maybe we’d like to meet his elephant?
Hell its 2.30 in the morning I’m pissed as ten men , for the life of me I couldn’t think of a single reason why we wouldn’t want meet this guys elephant!! Could you? Hell we didn’t want to be rude. So we dutifully stagger back out to the motorbike climb aboard and following this little thai bloke and a couple of his mates as they head back into the wilderness that is the never ending rubber plantation, we cant have travelled very far, the reason I say this is because given the degree of inebriation, I honestly don’t think we could’ve ridden very far without crashing, we came to a clearing in the jungle and bugger me dead, true to his word there are several elephants of various sizes parked near a lean-to …….do you park an elephant?
Anyway he was right, there were elephants and meet them we did! We also had another drink or two and it’s about now that the evening gets a touch fuzzy, I seem to remember sitting by a fire swigging neat Thai whiskey from a bottle and that’s about it. The next thing I remember is feeling this wet slimy thing rubbing itself up and down my cheek.
Have you ever woken from a big night out and been somewhat dazed and confused as to your exact whereabouts?
Well picture us, its about 10 am in the morning and its hot man, really hot, the suns streaming down and it’s brutal, we don’t have sun glasses, so the mere act of trying to open your eyes is debilitating and we have a hangover that would fair cripple one of the remaining elephants, it feels like a thai family of six has moved in behind my forehead and is building flats, oh god I’m sick!
All this and I’ve got elephant slobber all over my face from the wake-up kiss given to me by my bed mate, the smell of fresh elephant dung, which it turns out I’ve been sleeping in permeates the air, other heady smells are straw, leaves, vomit and stale sweat. Sick …ha …that doesn’t even begin to covey the state we were in! As I sat up and took in my surroundings, the previous nights exploits started to come back to me , as I look around it becomes apparent that we slept in the elephant stalls, surrounded by bloody big pachyderms …Christ we could’ve been crushed in our sleep!
My partner in crime is slowly coming to one elephant across and looks just as worse for wear, as he sits up and asks the plaintiff question “where the fuck are we “ the elephant between us bends its back legs just a fraction and proceeds to unleash a torrent of fresh urine into our bedding, galvanised into action by this last indignity we scramble from our resting place and look around , our hosts from the previous night are gone , the camps empty, the motor bike is laying on its side in the scrub near the lean too and only us and three elephants remain, and we still have no bloody idea where we are!
Stink, putrid is the word and let’s not forget hung-over, big-time, what a mess, Chris looks at his watch and swears ‘fuck I’ve gotta be on a plane for Bangkok at 1pm”….. It’s now 11am, ha, no chance!
The ride back into Patong was a blur, a long painful head pounding gut churning blur, interspersed with brief puke stops , somehow we made it back to Chris’s swanky hotel without getting killed , I stopped in the hotel driveway and he literally fell of the bike and onto the ground , the little bell boy looked horrified and I don’t wonder we must’ve made a hell of a sight , god knows we sure smelt bad enough, I wished my new found friend farewell and rode off towards a shower and a clean bed , its now12 midday, I never did see or hear from “Chris” again , I can only assume he made it onto his flight.
Holidays can be such an adventure!
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How to Sleep With an Elephant-Phuket 07/06/2006 06:42
