The Herd Instinct

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

Participants in the King’ s Cup Elephant Polo Tournament at Hua Hin, ailand, will start making their way in late August to the venue near the Gulf coast, on the other side of the country f rom 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. e players – an eccentric melange of celebrities, army offi cers, 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. e diff erence, I refl ected, while lying face down on a snowy towel and gazing deeply into a beaten brass bowl of fl oating 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 ai delicacies, f ragrant 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 fl utter of mosquito netting. Not for the fi rst time in my life, I am glad that I am not an elephant. e 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). ey

The herd

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 fl owers are fallen, rather than picked, and the restaurants emphasise ai, rather than imported, ingredients.

I arrived after a long fl ight 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 f ront of the 12-metre private pool, a trunk’s length f rom the sunken outdoor sitting area and opposite my personal outdoor massage pavilion. It was exquisite. Low lights. ai 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.

rd instinct

For elephant polo players, it is the perfect escape – a mere 20-minute drive f rom the polo ground at Suriyothai Military Camp, where the elephants travelling down f rom Chiang Mai in the north are lodged in the cool of the forest. It is here that monks open the seven-day tournament with a blessing and an elephant feast.

Elephant polo is 23 years old this year. It all began at Tiger Tops, the famous hotel on the grassy plains of Nepal, and soon became an annual event. Later, tournaments were held in Galle in Sri Lanka in 2001 and Hua Hin shortly afterwards (sadly this year ailand is

Above: Playing in the rain – action from the King’s Cup Tournament.

Above right: the dramatic entrance to the Aveson Hideaway Hua Hin the only host, due to political problems in Nepal and the eff ects of the tsunami in Sri Lanka).

During the week of the tournament, teams of between three and six players are tied on to their elephants for matches. ey depend on the mahout, sitting behind the elephant’s head, to steer. A polo elephant can reach a speed of 15mph (25kph), with the collision-potential of two small lorries, and the fi eld is a third of the conventional size. Past players include the Duke of Argyll and various members of the New Zealand All Blacks. ose staying at the Evason Hideaway will be able to soothe away their elephantine injuries (which last year included a crushed toe and extensive bruising f rom being sat on) with massages, facials and after-sun care. Guests can enjoy all sorts of other treats, f rom in-villa pool parties (with your own chef or barbecue) to cookery and yoga lessons. is is just as well, because Hua Hin – though famous as a royal watering hole, rather like Bangkok’ s Brighton – is not endowed with spectacular natural allure. On a coastal plain edged with mangroves and white sand, coconut palms wave elegantly enough on its f ringes, but the interior is fl at, hectic with shrimp farms and pineapple plantations.

team of ladies preparing the outdoor massage pavilion for my holistic massage. I closed my eyes and lay on my back, opening them only when the cool cotton pads were removed to admire the ceiling of dried teak leaves and the cheeky mynah bird on the wall, clearly hoping that some of the essential unguents might be edible. e masseuse set to work, restoring life back into legs enfeebled by days of total inactivity, gingering up my lymphatic system, halting the general facial downslide.

Meanwhile, I tried to imagine what an elephant

e town itself is a benefi ciary of the spa boom –being within easy scampering distance of Bangkok – and lying parallel to the coast as a long, bustling place with a night market (fake bags, wraparound linen trousers, dresses, children’s clothes, electronics and cheap CDs and DVDs). e Royal Palace takes up an entire block, on one side of which stands a gigantic, gold-f ramed portrait of King Bhumipol and his queen.

So closeted are you in the confi nes of the Hideaway, with its maze of paths and secretive villas, that it is a shock to emerge into the real world. I elected to sail down to the mouth of the Praknam River on a junk, in the safe knowledge that with a large crew plus champagne and canapés served on a shady deck, it wouldn’t be too real world.

We drove for 20 minutes through the fl attish landscape with its abrupt hills of red earth and foliage, past rows of pineapples in fi elds lined with plastic bags on sticks to scare the birds. Acacia trees and hibiscus bushes exploded with red and yellow blooms. Yet the port was not a marina fi lled with leisure craft and gin palaces. Far f rom it. It was a busy, working place, lined with big fi shing boats tip-tilted at either end like bananas, with cabins divided into three cramped levels. ‘Most of the crew live on board,’ explained the captain of our boat, the June Bahtha Jonque. ‘Many of them are Burmese working here in ailand to make money to send home. e captains are nearly always ai’ . Sure enough, families busied themselves about the decks, occasionally raising a hand as we passed. ree little boys fi shed off the back of one boat. e smell of drying squid, laid out on the river banks in the sun, lent a certain piquancy to the champagne.

Once we got to the river mouth, the sailors put up the asymmetrical sails of the junk and we billowed silently past a row of shrimp boats, lined up for a night’s work in the gulf, and past the buoy banning anyone f rom entering the King’s private holiday bay. e net result of all this activity was, obviously, exhaustion. An early night was called for. In the morning, woken by a tap on my outer door and the tinkle of cutlery and glass, I staggered out to fi nd breakfast laid out on my poolside table – f resh guava juice, f resh pomelo, pineapple and papaya, boiled eggs and multigrain toast soldiers – and a small polo player might need doing – mallet arm, perhaps, after wielding a stick more than two-metres long to hit a ball, or rope burns f rom being tied onto the elephant as it lumbers along – but soon gave up. It was far too tiring to think about. ■

If you wish to set eyes on no other guest for your entire stay, that is entirely possible

How to get there

ITC Classics (01244 355527; www.itcclassics.co.uk) offers seven nights at the Evason Hideaway Hua Hin, staying in a Hideaway Villa, from £1,175 per person, room only, based on two sharing. This includes return economy fl ights with British Airways (Club World upgrade supplement from £1,000 pp each way) and all transfers. Treatments at the Six Senses Spa range from a 50minute Indian Head Massage (£21) to a 90-minute Sensory Spa Journey (£110). An 80-minute Jet Lag Recovery massage costs £41.

For information about elephant polo, visit www.thaielepolo.com

Scotland’s Chivas Regal team celebrates becoming runner-up in the King’s Cup elephant polo tournament