See Monkey Travel: Elephant Polo

The minute I heard there would be an elephant polo tournament in Bangkok, I had my mind set on attending. Having never witnessed a traditional polo match, I fully intended to have no idea what was going on, but just looked forward to seeing a bunch of elephants play around.

Cheeky elephants.

Due to the match being scheduled in the height of rainy season, it was of course raining all weekend for the tournament. Everyone came away with muddy shoes and legs, having drank more than expected as we sought shelter in the booze tents and without getting to actually see them play a game. The rain drove all scheduled matches to be decided by shoot-outs, which were sometimes exciting, but mostly painstakingly slow as the 'players' were quite unaccustomed to playing their sport on an elephant and took quite a long time to adjust their shots.

Buddies.

Each elephant has a mahout, trainer, who guides the elephant and in this case uses the prodder to get them to perform. The tournament claims to be benefiting elephants in Thailand and chooses elephants that would otherwise work in camps or on the street and provides them medical care and decent wages for the mahout. The tournament also claims not to force elephants to play - the thought is that most elephants like to play games and many catch on. Those that resist and seem unhappy are supposedly taken out without a problem. Again, we didn't have an opportunity to watch a game, so I can't speak too much about how that all works.

When in Rome...

At the end of the day, it was a nice adventure to the outskirts of town and I'm glad we were able to go. Not sure I'd be too concerned with going again, but maybe I just need to learn more about it all.
Here's a link to the tournament page: http://www.anantaraelephantpolo.com/ and here are some more photos from the day. Cheers!