Patara is a nice place where the people give you lessons on how to treat, and take care, and ride elephants.  For the day, you get your own personal elephant to bathe, ride, and feed.  My elephant was called Mecan, and the way I remember Mecan, is the word mechanical.

In the first 20 minutes, you feed your elephant bananas and sugar cane.  When you wanted them to open their mouths, you would say:  “Bone”.   And if they obey, and eat what you give them, you say:  “Dee dee”.  Deedee means good boy or good girl.

Once you finished that, you would move on to body care.

Body care

When you give your elephant body care, it is cleaning it.  First, the elephant usually has lots of dirt on them.  So you would take a branch, and brush the dirt off of them.  You would brush until there wasn’t much dirt left on them.

Danny dusting off Mecan

Then, you would go to the water, and get a bucket and a scrub.

The elephants would sit down in the water, and you would then get on their backs.  You would take the bucket, and fill it with water, and then you would dump it on the elephant’s body.

You would repeat as many times as you could, and then it would be time for you to scrub them. You would take your brush, and scrub it in them whereever the water was dumped.  If you did this for about 20 minutes, they would get clean. And then, it would be time for you to ride your elephants!

Riding your elephant

Danny getting a little boost

So, you may not think this would be the way to mount an elephant, but it is.  Instead of having the elephant sit down, the elephant would lift its trunk to its back while you held on, and then you would let go, and be on the elephants back!  But you had to wear colorful cloths that they provided for you before you got on.  I think the color was a way of greeting the elephant.  Then, the elephants would just let you ride them for 30 minutes, and then you would hop of.  Total, the time you had with your elephants, was about 1 and a half hours long!  So, I thought it was fun, and you might too!