Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort: Bubbles of Refuge

Escape with the elephants at the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort.

This article was written by Chris White. Photography courtesy of Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort.

When the elephant appears at our deck, it’s nine on the evening before our departure from the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort.

Since our butler dropped us off in our “Jungle Bubble,” my wife, Yupin, and I have been unwinding from a lazy rainy day, and now we’re reading in bed. Our space-age structure takes glamping to the nth degree, from the airlock entryway to our bedroom large enough for a living area, and this queen four-poster, complete with linen privacy curtains to the sink and vanity area separating us from the bathroom: all the climate control, comfort, and accouterments of our suite back in the main resort, distilled for a single night. The design-child of a Spanish company called Skybubbles and constructed with Précontraint Serge Ferrari® technology, this three-chambered tent resembles a bizarre igloo the walls and dome ceiling of the main room are clear as glass, while pistachio-colored polyester rounds out the smaller sections. The point is to remove all visible barriers between guests and their environment so one might drift to sleep while stargazing, but tonight is overcast, so our view is limited: we watch water droplets sliding down the bubble’s transparent exterior. Hypnotic, sure, but a far cry from the undulations of the Milky Way.

Yupin notices our visitor first. She shoots upright from bed, glides across the thin wooden floor, and presses up against the clear wall, exclaiming, “Come look! A big one, right at the fence!”

Anyone who has ever experienced the joy of spotting a cardinal light upon a birdfeeder or a deer feed on apples in their backyard should recognize how we’re feeling only multiply by about ten thousand. It’s a primal sensation, this childlike wonder and amazement. The elephant looks pretty happy, too, her tail swinging as she collects stalks of grass and munches away. From the outside, our bedroom must look like a giant eyeball the two of us combined into a singular pupil, dilated and focused upon this near-mythical creature at our doorstep but she pays us no mind.

“She’s smiling,” I say. “So content.”

We head out the airlock foyer for a closer look, and I’m careful to close the bedroom door behind us before we open the exterior one. Our porter had warned us: “If you open both at once, the bubble will deflate!” Her nervous laugh set off a small jolt of anxiety–I imagined the thick plastic flopping down and suffocating us. This mental picture seasons our otherwise luxe experience with a sprinkle of danger, but although the bubble’s dome recedes ever-so-slightly, my fears prove overblown (ha-ha). The true thrill hits when we step outside, our bare feet squishing the puddles on the wood planking there, just beyond the deck’s railing, a second massive elephant lumbers towards us through the tall grasses of the abutting field. And this one isn’t contentedly tucking into dessert.

She’s imposing, majestic. Wild?

All we know about the elephants here is that the Anantara’s partner, the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, saved them from lives of bondage and hardships: work on city streets amid torturous noise and noxious smog, back-breaking labor for lumber companies, or cruel treatment in tourist operations. I’ve met enough rescue dogs to understand that many animals carry memories of abuse and everyone knows that elephants never forget anything. So again, there’s that excitement of possible peril, especially in the absence of any mahouts. She could be on the hunt, and we could be standing between her and her next meal. But like the first elephant out front, she’s not really interested in us. As she approaches our platform, she turns to her right and starts tearing into a stand of bamboo, chomping down. Still, I maintain a cautious distance, obeying my inner voice advising against becoming another Instagram-selfie statistic.

Just as the Jungle Bubble provides the exhilaration of seeing elephants close-up and on their home turf the Anantara’s location in the infamous Golden Triangle also imparts a feeling of adventure. As Thailand is the most developed of the three countries at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers, it’s easy to feel as though you’ve reached the end of the world; beyond the lanterns on our deck, I can see no lights in the tangled jungles of Myanmar and Laos, only the vague black shapes of mountains in the darkness. And while my rational mind knows that the resort proper is just up the bluff, a mere phone call away, and the mahouts and security guards patrol the fields and border nearby, there’s a oneness out here, a convincing illusion of wilderness, of the primeval forest before the encroachments of man.

The Anantara has more on tap than just the Jungle Bubble we luxuriated in the infinity-edge pool, the open-air restaurant, and the CBD-oil massage treatments; we delighted in our vintage Enfield motorcycle-and-sidecar tour through the town of Chiang Saen and its ancient hilltop temples but our time among elephants proves the most immersive. After sleeping to the pattering of raindrops from a late-night shower, we wake near dawn to take coffee on our deck while our new friend ambles over on her big soft feet for a hearty breakfast. Soon thereafter, the porter arrives in the resort’s all-terrain tuktuk and delivers us to the lower fields. There we rendezvous with a team of three mahouts, two adult female elephants, and the four-year-old “little boy” they have adopted as their nephew. We walk with them, feed them figs the pink snouts of their trunks cool on our hands. We watch the little one bathe in the Ruak, admire how the elephants rub their shoulders and backs against favorite trees. We follow their lead through the floodplain, along the paths of their choosing. And while we feel some sadness as we say our goodbyes, it’s comforting to know that they and their extended herd of about thirty rescues have found homes in this sanctuary, their own bubble, open to the skies and the music of birds, to the sounds of the river and the rustlings of their favorite elephant grasses.

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