This interesting article was published in the Australian Easter saturday I have cut and pasted the whole article as the link refused to work, when I tested before posting.
Swimming with Rajan
* Tony Perrottet
* From: The Australian
* April 23, 2011 12:00AM
Elephant
Elephants were used for logging in the Andamans and swam between islands.
[attachment=0:2ha8k4ey]853578-elephant.jpg[/attachment:2ha8k4ey]
Picture: Tony Perrottet Source: The Australian
"JUST don't swim in front of him," whispers Sanjit Biswas, a worker at Barefoot at Havelock, the jungle lodge where I am staying in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. "That can spook him."
My guide from Bangalore nods in solemn agreement. "Rajan's a little bit fussy. Sometimes he just won't go in and nobody can really force him."
I tiptoe through the shallows of Beach No 7 to meet my elephantine swimming buddy. No sudden moves or I could be squashed flat as a chapatti. Rajan finishes off a pile of bananas and thuds down to the gently lapping water. His mahout, a wiry villager named Nasur, steps up on one tusk and slips over his back as casually as if he were hopping on a bicycle.
I hover uncertainly. Swimming with a 6000kg pachyderm is a bit more ambitious than cavorting with a dolphin around, say, Monkey Mia or Stradbroke Island. Turns out I don't have to worry as Rajan is more comfortable in the water than I am.
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The story of the swimming elephant of the Andamans has all the elements of a modern fairytale. Rajan was brought from mainland India as a youngster in the 1970s to work for local logging companies and spent a gruelling 30 years hauling felled trees through the jungle; he was underfed and overworked, similar to his human co-workers. At the time there were about 200 elephants on the archipelago and the only way companies could move them between islands, once the hardwood trees had been extracted, was to have them swim.
Then, in 2002, the Indian Supreme Court banned logging in the Andamans to protect the biological diversity of the islands. Most of the elephants were shipped back to the mainland to labour at Hindu temples. But lucky Rajan, whose rich owner was in no hurry to sell, was left on Havelock Island in the care of his old mahout. There he enjoyed an enviable life, spending his time grazing, dozing and, about once a week, swimming in the sea, an activity he seems to enjoy immensely.
The swimming elephant became Havelock's unofficial mascot and made him a celebrity among the few travellers who made it here. But in 2008, his owner received a lavish offer of about $75,000 from a temple in Kerala and Rajan faced a return to a harsh, often cruel work regime. So the owners of Barefoot at Havelock put out an appeal via the internet to former guests and raised the cash to buy Rajan outright, so he could enjoy his old age on Beach No 7.
Luckily, the morning I swim with him, the Indian Ocean is like a warm bath, just the way Rajan likes it. I first tread water a short distance away, watching him step like a delicate matron into the water. He raises his trunk to breathe as if it were a giant snorkel and his mahout slides off his back and swims alongside; soon Rajan is pedalling away with his feet, gliding through the blue depths with unexpected ease.
In my goggles and fins, I drift alongside, admiring Rajan's graceful slow-motion paddle and, at one stage, brushing my palm along his wrinkled flanks.
For one unforgettable stretch, I flipper downwards and swim beneath Rajan, watching him from below. Weightless and drifting in silence, I have the strange sensation that we are flying.
I already knew the Andamans would be insanely exotic but this is taking things to a new level, more like a Hindu fantasy. Babar gone Bollywood, perhaps.
I should hardly be surprised by dreamlike experiences in the Andaman Islands, given that the archipelago has always been the least known, least populated and least visited corner of that sprawling cabinet of wonders that is Mother India. Few places have been so shrouded in obscurity. For centuries, sailors in the Bay of Bengal told fantastical tales about the island's tiny, black-skinned cannibals who would butcher shipwrecked crews.
The image of the Andamans hardly improved in 1858, when they were settled by the British as a prison camp for Indian independence activists. The new arrivals were terrified when they encountered the Stone Age inhabitants, who were related to African pygmies. The rest of the world learned about the tribe in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1888 Sherlock Holmes thriller Sign of the Four wherein a one-legged convict escapes from the Andamans and stalks London in the company of a murderous, dart-blowing savage with gnashing yellow fangs.
After independence, the Indian government kept a tight seal on the strategically sensitive islands. Non-Indians were not permitted to explore the Andamans at all until 1995 and even today foreign nationals are only allowed to visit 38 of the islands. And yet, in the past few years, word has leaked out about the unearthly perfection of the islands. Today, 84 per cent of the land mass is protected as national park or tribal reserves for the native inhabitants.
The beaches are pristine, the diving spectacular and the jungle shudders with wildlife. As yet, there are no grand tourist developments, only modest hotels, bamboo huts and thatch-roofed cottage resorts. It's an irresistible prospect, but how is this forgotten patch of tropical paradise going to survive its impending popularity?
I begin my trip in Port Blair, a former outpost of the Empire that still qualifies as one of the world's most ramshackle tropical backwaters. But within hours, I am sunning myself on the roof of a public ferry as it skims across shallow reefs to a different world.
Havelock Island has been a favourite goal for independent-minded travellers since 1995. This is where the most alluring elements of the archipelago are condensed into a tropical cocktail of coral, sand and rainforest.
Tourism is still home-spun, small-scale and personal, like an Indian version of Hemingway's Key West in Florida. This becomes obvious when I meet Susheel Dixit, the intense 47-year-old who founded the tiny Barefoot at Havelock in 1996. As we drive along the west side of the island, dodging roosters and crabs, Susheel explains how business was rather slow until 2004, when Time magazine suddenly named Beach No 7 (so named because it used to be a logging camp labelled No 7) as the best in Asia. "I think people were amazed," he laughs.
"They looked at the magazine and must have thought: 'Where the bloody hell are the Andamans?'."
Barefoot at Havelock still feels rather like a lost colony of shipwrecked sailors, with 18 thatched-roof cabins in the rainforest. Beach No 7 is a 1.6km-long crescent of sand, unmarred by even a pebble underfoot. Jungle pours like a tidal wave from the hills behind.
In this isolated dreamscape, even the simplest activity seems bizarre. I go to dinner at the only nearby restaurant, run by two expat Italians, and cautiously order a glass of the grandly named Madame de Pompadour champagne, made in Hyderabad. (It should have on its label: Nowhere Near as Bad as You'd Think.)
The meal is interrupted when all the diners go down to the beach to watch a giant leatherback turtle digging her nest. Later, when I ask for the bathroom, the waiter points to the bushes. "You take a torch," he grins. "Snakes!"
I think he's joking until next afternoon at the lodge when, a stone's throw from my room, I'm summoned by Susheel to watch a 4.5m king cobra devour a 3.5m water krait. Eyeing me with suspicion, the cobra works its lethal jaws, then ploughs into the jungle to digest its meal in private.
And yet as pristine as Havelock may be, there are ominous signs for the future. Immigrant Bengali farmers continue to clear land for paddy fields to plant rice crops. Backpacker hostels are sprouting on the west coast. Garbage disposal is the biggest problem, with piles of refuse simply dumped near the jetty. Signs in the villages implore that something must be done now or "face disaster".
Susheel offers to take me on a three-day camping trip to the uninhabited islands north of Havelock. At dawn, our dungi, or motorised dugout canoe, slips from the jetty on to a glassy sea, manned by five Karen tribesmen from Burma. I sit at the prow and allow myself a modest Heart of Darkness moment as I disappear into the tropics. For two days, I indulge in the Robinson Crusoe desert-island fantasy of swimming, basking and eating fish roasted on an open fire. We camp behind the beach, sipping Kingfisher beers as hermit crabs sidle around our feet. Hungry bats drop fruit seeds on to our tarpaulin, making regular thuds, while Susheel tells stories from his childhood days in Port Blair, when he would take boats to wrecked ships to see what could be salvaged before the hulls were sucked under the waves. "What else could I do? he asks with a laugh. "There was no television."
At dawn, I am woken by the Karen patriarch, Norman, handing me a glass of chai. That's when I have my perfect moment. I set off in a kayak and as the sun erupts in a pink ball on the horizon, suddenly the water is boiling around me; hundreds of tiny fish are leaping out of the waves. Just as quickly, I am left alone, bobbing in silence.
I may not have achieved the ineffable inner peace described by the holy sadhus, but it's as close as I may get in this lifetime.
Checklist
There is a detailed travel guide to the Andamans and information on getting there at T & I contributor Vijay Verghese's specialist Asia e-magazine. More: http://www.smarttravelasia.com/andamans.htm.
* http://www.barefootindia.com
* http://www.tourism.andaman.nic.in
* http://www.incredibleindia.org
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Originally Posted by lonelywombat
