travel When the elephant polo season begins in Thailand, the players know where to calm their nerves and soothe their senses. Sophie Campbell samples some luxury grooming
articipants in the King’s Cup Elephant Polo Tournament at Hua Hin, Thailand, will start making their way in late August to the venue near the Gulf coast, on the other side of the country from the tsunami-ravaged Indian Ocean beaches. After a 12-hour journey and a welcome banquet at their luxury resort, they will spend a week acclimatising to monsoon conditions before play begins on September 5. And that’s just the elephants. The players – an eccentric melange of celebrities, army officers, ex-pats, Bangkok ladyboys and international daredevils – will be doing almost exactly the same thing, fanning out to the numerous top-level spas around Hua Hin. The difference, I reflected, while lying face down on a snowy towel and gazing deeply into a beaten brass bowl of floating jasmine petals provided by one such billet – the Evason Hideaway & Six Senses Spa – is that the elephants only get a hose-down. While they tuck into bales of sugar cane, corn cobs, sticky rice and molasses served by their elephant-handlers, or ‘mahouts’, anyone staying at the Evason will, like me, pick at Thai delicacies, fragrant with galanggal, lemon grass and killer chillis, all served by a personal butler. Sleep will come not while attached to a stake under a shady tree but on high thread-count sheets, in subtle air-conditioning, under the gentle flutter of mosquito netting. Not for the first time in my life, I am glad that I am not an elephant. The Evason Hideaway is less than a year old; one of the latest additions to the Six Senses portfolio of hotels owned by Sonu and Eva Shivdesani (their most famous property being Soneva Fushi in the Maldives, with new ones appearing all the time). They
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The herd i like to keep one eye on luxury, the other on the environment: the 400 ponds and pools in the grounds are stocked with guppies to eat the mosquito larvae; swimming pools are saline, rather than chlorinated; table flowers are fallen, rather than picked, and the restaurants emphasise Thai, rather than imported, ingredients. I arrived after a long flight and was greeted by an in-room Jet Lag Recovery Massage. Not in my room, you understand, but in my spare room, the one just across the lily pond and in front of the 12-metre private pool, a trunk’s length from the sunken outdoor
sitting area and opposite my personal outdoor massage pavilion. It was exquisite. Low lights. Thai whale music. And I had a charming, softly spoken therapist called Pu, with hands of supple steel which unravelled intra-muscular knots like knitting. It is also extraordinarily private. If, for some reason, you wished to set eyes on no other guests for your entire stay, that would be entirely possible. Every villa has its own pool - not all have two separate rooms, but some have little gardens leading down to a large pond and others are duplexes with outdoor terraces.
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