23 May 2008

Today was a crazy day. We woke up early to wash elephants in a river, that’s right. After this we took some rides on the elephants. Some of the babies were still breast-feeding which was something I never imagined I would see. The elephants ranged from 3 months to 76 years old at the camp. Not a bad range for a group of maybe 15. This was followed by stopping off at a very decorative temple of Shiva. Shiva is one of the main Hindu gods, recognizable by the snakes he wears, trident, and river (often spouting from a woman’s mouth) that springs from his hair. He is the god of destruction and recreation, or change. I’ll summarize my Hindu mythology lessons later in a piece, but for now I want to mention that after visiting a Shiva temple, you are to dust yourself off or you may carry the dust of the temple that can carry destruction with it. We moved on to a wildlife safari on a bus. On the way back we saw a ritual going on in a nearby village as they were celebrating Durga puja. Music was playing and people watched on as a man in a trance pulsed to music while kneeling on the floor. Afterwards several goats were decapitated and had their left forearm severed and placed in their mouth. It is safe to say no one in the group had seen this before. Dr. Nadeem had been wanting pictures of this for a lecture on comparison of slaughter methods used. The whole process was done in one stroke for each head with a very large curved knife, similar to the ones used to cut our young coconuts we’ve enjoyed. The villagers were very nice and the children liked to say hi to us in English like most places we go. We ended the day with dinner at the hotel where people wound down to absorb the day’s events before going to board a sleeper bus we took back. I use the term ‘sleeper’ lightly, but I am sure I managed to get a few hours in.