elephant muster in surin
Travel Location: Surin,Thailand
This blog might be a bit elephant light on the words and heavy on the pictures, as we had lots of fun in a short space of time.
We sort of rashly decided to go on a 10 hour return train detour from our planned route to the elephant round-up in Surin in eastern Thailand. We were only there for just over 24 hours.
Elephant tennis
Surin seemed to be an otherwise quite normal Thai town, but every year they host a tourist elephant muster, which revolves around 2 3-hour elephant shows in the towns main stadium (known all year round as Elephant Show Stadium). Sadly we arrived in town 1 day after the worlds biggest elephant buffet, where stalls are set-up by the road to welcome the elephants into town with piles and piles of tasty food for them.
The elephant show was much better than expected. Although there was a little too much in the way of dancing local school kids we did see:
Elephant tug-of-war (elephant wins against 60 people) Elephant football Elephants in full battle regalia 300 Elephants Elephant hand stands Elephant darts Elephant tennis (actually there wasn’t any of this) Elephants painting and more elephant fun.
But probably better than all of this was the fact that there were just lots of elephants everywhere you looked in town. This had a downside in that there were also mahouts (elephant trainers) and some enterprising locals pretending to have an elephant nearby selling bananas and sugar cane at inflated prices for you to feed to the beasts. It was also easy enough to hail an elephant taxi to take you around town. We took a ride just before getting on the train, was lovely.
