Confusing Cultural Conundrum in the Central Highlands (Elephant Town Vietnam style)

By John Roberts 28 July 2008 10:41:00

I didn't know this at the time but there's a nursery song that every Vietnamese child learns, starts something like this...

    "Chew voi cong er Ban Don
    Chew cong nga, diew cong cher cong"

    It means, so I'm told (in all the excitement I didn't get time to learn Vietnamese), "In Ban Don there's a baby elephant, his tusks are small because he's still a child", I learned this song on a stormy road, with a belly full of Saigon Special beer and Vietnamese food, on my way back to the very town of Ban Don.



    "Voi" means elephant and the Thai scholars amongst you will have guessed that "nga" means tusk, because, well, it is the same in Thai - if you're an elephant nerd you'll find this fascinating - well maybe not, but I often say it was the mahouts who got me into this (usually uttered loudly and as an excuse in budget meetings, but in this case referring to my life and entirely positively) and the similarities and diversities between the various cultures of folks who devote their lives to their giant charges have always fascinated me.

    So what about Ban Don?  About 35km from the Cambodian border in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the capital of Dak Lak province until the French moved it to Buon Me Thuot citing Ban Don's heat and backwoods isolation; a town where everyone speaks their tribal language first, Lao second, Vietnamese third; where, driving into town, much like Ban Ta Klang in Isaan or Hong Sa in Laos, you can see eles grazing in rice paddies or walking down the road laden with wood; a town where an elephant boy can feel at home.



    But who looks after the elephants?  My GPS tells me, probably illegally, I'm only about 500km from Lung Lord's house in Ta Klang (were I equipped with a helicopter), 500km and bits of three countries, so it would follow that the mahouts would be Khmer speaking Suay right?  Wrong - I don't comprehend Suay but I got my guys on the phone to see if communication could be established, it could not.  They all speak Lao (which is remarkably close to my inexcusable Northern Thai) so you'd think they'd be Thai Lue as in Hong Sa?  Wrong, they all speak Lao anyway around here, these guys either live in lowland Laos style houses or communal long houses.

    Their equipment is a long pole with a spike and curve on top, a kind of medieval pike, of the kind I last saw in Sri Lanka - they know their elephants well, like professional, born-beneath-the-trunk generational mahouts and hardly ever use any implement; they also use a stick with a piece of buffalo horn on the end of a long string to extend the reach of their arm - something I've never seen used with elephants before.



    A little asking around and I discover that they are the Ede people, allegedly originally from Indonesia and M'Nong people migrated from who knows where?  But when riding the elephants they sit like the Laos but give their commands in Suay - or a language derived from it - the language of the Isaan mahouts around Surin and Buriram in Thailand.

    To muddy the waters further they take me to a graveyard, a mausoleum reserved for their best elephant catchers, the greatest of which caught 427 in his time, including a white elephant that he presented to the King of Siam earning the Siamese princely title Khunsunob - there are graves of lesser huntsmen who only caught the odd hundred.  Is it safe to guess that this area was under Siamese control at the time?  Is it safe to guess anything?



    How do/did you catch your elephants?  In kraals and stockades like the Laos, Galieng or do you use lassos like the khru ba yai of Isaan?  Ahhhh.... let us show you the equipment!



    Buffalo hide ropes and bamboo lasoo poles, exactly the same idea and equipment as in Isaan (actually this shouldn't be surprising as the lasoo method lends itself to the plains whereas the stockade to mountains) but on a little questioning it turns out the ceremonies and protocols are similar to what little I know of those used by the Khru Ba Yai of Isaan.



    To sum up, if not conclude, at the most famous elephant town in Vietnam, close to the Cambodian border, you find elephants cared for by an Indonesian speaking people, the leader of whom had a Siamese princely title but who speak pure Lao as a second language; their elephant commands are related to (possibly old and mispronounced) Suay, their traditions and handling methods seem to be directly Isaan.

    I scratched my head, had another Vietnamese coffee, reflected that their elephants were fat, happy and (at least at the Ban Don Eco-Resort) had plenty of room to roam so none of this really matters and, of course, a conundrum of this scale is always another excuse to re-visit an elephant town.

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