Travels on My Elephant

THERE IS NO better way to see India than from the howdah of an Indian elephant. This is exactly what Mark Shand discovered as he set out on a thousand kilometre journey on Tara, a thirty-year-old female elephant. Their destination was the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant market.

What began as an adventurous whim soon developed into an unlikely romance. Tara, the scrawny and ill-treated begging elephant which Shand had acquired, was transformed through tender loving care on the journey into a star attraction. Everywhere they went -into communities that had not changed in millennia or along new arterial roads where trans-continental juggernauts thundered past -the western mahout, trained by Tara's minder, and his five eccentric Indian companions drew inquisitive crowds to admire their elephant. This account of the trials and tribulations of the journey is told with charm and wit, and is illustrated with captivating photographs in colour. Yet, in the best tradition of all good travel writing, there was an inward as well as an outward journey. Merely arriving was not the end of the story, and finding a good home for Tara was to present the greatest challenge of all.

With an ear for the comic, an eye for the exotic and a nose for bizarre incident, Shand informs as he entertains and in doing so brings an individual view to the fabulous legacy of one of the oldest and richest associations ever known between man and animal -a partnership that over 4,000 years has imbued the most ancient surviving culture with inestimable meaning and significance.

With the help of a Maratha nobleman, Mark Shand buys an elephant named Tara and rides her over six hundred miles across India to the Sonepur Mela, the world's oldest elephant market. From Bhim, a drink-racked mahout, Shand learned to ride and care for her. From his friend Aditya Patankar he learned Indian ways. And with Tara, his new companion, he fell in love. "Travels on my Elephant" is the story of their epic journey across India, from packed highways to dusty back roads where communities were unchanged for millennia. It is also a memorable, touching account of Tara's transformation from scrawny beggar elephant to star attraction, and of the romance that developed between her and her owner Mark Shand. For what began as an adventurous whim has developed, decades later, into a life of campaigning to provide vital migratory corridors for these magnificent creatures whose habitat is under constant assault from man.