By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong by Boorman Charley

Author:Boorman, Charley [Boorman, Charley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2008-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

I called mine Betty. That wasn’t her name but I couldn’t pronounce the name the keeper told me, so Betty it was. We had a jeep waiting an hour up the road and this was the way we had decided to reach it - two elephants, both females. But first we had to take them down to the waterhole for a bath.

Betty didn’t want to get down on her knees, and I didn’t blame her. I waded in to offer some encouragement, wincing at the sharp stones underfoot. Meanwhile Russ’s elephant wandered in and rolled over without any fuss, while the driver worked his way up her shoulder and onto her ribs - once perched there he began washing her down. Betty, seeing that it wasn’t so bad, finally followed suit. The keeper told us that these two elephants got along well, as most of their elephants did. However, the ones that didn’t like each other didn’t like each other’s driver either, which made life interesting. Elephants have long life spans and are famed for their ability to remember so much: if you mistreat one and you come across it again twenty years later, it certainly won’t have forgotten you.

Betty had pink patches on her ears and a pinkish trunk that had once been bitten by another elephant. I climbed onto her back as she knelt down, using her tail as a rope and stepping on her foot. I sat with my legs spread on a canvas saddle behind the driver and waited while Russ hesitantly mounted his, telling me he just didn’t feel right about stepping on her foot. Then we were off, lumbering across open pasture to the dirt road that drifted through the trees. It was a gentle, rolling and rocking motion - much easier and more comfortable than riding a horse. The view was superb; sitting so high we could see for miles and the country was spectacular. The villages were beautifully kept; the houses neat and the yards swept. Some were traditional thatch while others were made of whitewashed concrete blocks with tin roofs. The pace of life felt gentle: an old world and yet touched by the new. We passed one traditional home with ochre and stucco walls and a magnificent old thatch, chickens pecking for grubs in the yard while a barefoot woman chatted on a mobile phone. We wandered past a little school and the kids came chasing after us, yelling hello and asking for pens.

My driver had an umbrella and I perched underneath it for shade. Perfect, I thought. We’d been in Nepal for less than a day and already we’d canoed the Rafti, and now we were heading towards the capital on a couple of elephants.

Back on the ground we commandeered another Willys-type US army jeep: this one was grey with a grey hood and the driver had plastered the interior with pictures of famous Indian actresses. The weather was changing; we were climbing now and the sky had slipped from a brilliant blue to an ominous-looking purple.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.