[Lifestyle] The elephant I was riding threw me, then rolled over me like a steamroller. All my bones broke at once

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The elephant I was riding threw me, then rolled over me like a steamroller. All my bones broke at once

 

 

 

 

Gemma Jones’s dream holiday left her with a crushed pelvis, ribs and collarbone – and changed her life for the better. Twenty years on, she remembers the attack that began with an ominous growl

It was as Gemma Jones was climbing on to the elephant, over its head and on to its back, that she began to have misgivings. The trek through the hillside jungle in north Thailand, near Chiang Mai, was highly rated by other travellers. Jones had been expecting a ladder, perhaps even a saddle. Instead she found a wooden plank, lashed precariously with rope across the animal’s back. “I remember climbing on and thinking: ‘I don’t know about this,’” she says.

Jones, 45, is a clinical psychologist and yoga therapist based in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Back then, in October 2002, she was 24 years old and days into what was meant to be a 15-month trip through south-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand with two friends.

 

She was a relatively experienced traveller, but this trek, with leeches, outdoor ablutions and spiders “the size of my head”, had taken her to the edge of her comfort zone. By the third and final day, she was ready for the city, but not before the activity she’d looked forward to most: an elephant ride.

For their group of nine, five elephants were brought to their bamboo huts: four adult animals and a smaller adolescent, each led by a mahout (guide). Jones and her friend Yvette (a pseudonym, at her request) were to ride together on one of the fully grown animals while Berni, the third in their trio, sat by herself on the younger elephant behind.

What first struck Jones as she climbed up the elephant was, inevitably, its size. It was huge – “just nothing like” what she had imagined from watching nature documentaries. These were Asian elephants, slightly smaller than the African variety, and up to 12ft high and weighing up to 12,000lb (5,400kg). The creature was so tall and so broad that Jones – perched next to Yvette on the plank across its back – could not see the ground on either side, or the mahout walking by its head.

 

Gemma Jones on a subsequent trip to Thailand, five years after the attack.

The next surprise was a low rumble from deep within the elephant. She could feel it travelling up her legs. “I didn’t know that elephants could growl,” she says. In 2002, elephant rides were seen as innocent fun, and a key draw for tourists in Thailand. “You don’t realise, in your 20s, that just because you’re allowed to do something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all going to be fine,” she says.

They set out in uneasy formation, the elephants lumbering along the uneven ground. The two women struggled to hold on against the rolling motion. “As soon as we started, I was like: ‘I don’t like it,’” says Jones.

After 10 minutes, the elephant stopped so abruptly that Jones was nearly launched over its head. As the three elephants in front continued along the path, theirs moved to follow. But then it came to a halt again.

The third time the elephant stopped, it turned to look at the mahout, now in Jones’s line of sight. “The mahout’s face suddenly turned white,” she says. “The look of fear – I remember thinking: ‘That’s not good.’”

The mahout turned and ran. The elephant gave chase. “I don’t know how long we held on for – it could have been seconds, or minutes,” says Jones.

Eventually the animal stumbled, or it may have deliberately thrown them. Jones and Yvette were both tossed to the ground, one to each side of the charging elephant.

I was thinking I was safe, that it was gone. Then I realised that the elephant hadn’t kept going – it was still over us

 

They landed hard, in a bramble bush. Jones’s glasses bumped up against her eyes, temporarily taking away the sight in her left. Her clothes were shredded, along with much of the skin on her left side, from armpit to hip. But her split-second reaction was of relief. “I was thinking I was safe, that it was gone,” she says. “Then I realised that the elephant hadn’t kept going – the elephant was still over us.”

What happened next Jones registered in flashes, like a silent film. In such a high-stakes situation, “your brain is constantly catching up. Everything is changing second by second,” she says.

There was no pain. “This is one of the things I learned: your brain just takes over and starts to sedate you,” says Jones. “That’s part of the trauma: you dissociate. You have to – you can’t cope with what’s going on.”

Yvette was able to scramble out of the way; Jones was caught by her long sleeves and trouser legs. Yvette later confessed to Jones that she felt guilty for abandoning her friend, but Jones told her she’d had no choice. “There was no ‘fight’ option, it was literally: run. You just didn’t stand a chance. It was massive – and it was everywhere.”

The elephant towered over Jones, who was on all fours beneath its belly and in the thick of “this chaotic scramble of feet and legs”, she says. Its limbs were like tree trunks being uprooted and crashing down around her.

“It was at that point I started thinking about my family – the impact that this was going to have on them, and what would happen if I died.”

Then the elephant grabbed Jones with its trunk. “It wrapped itself around me, picked me up and threw me,” she says. It did this more than once.

Jones remembers a distinct thought penetrating her limited consciousness: that, at age 24, “Everything that has happened to me could be everything that is going to happen to me – this is where it stops.”

 

Jones at her home today. Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Guardian

Then the elephant brought its great bulk down on the ground, level with Jones. It rolled over her from right to left, like a steamroller. “All my bones broke at once: my collarbone, my ribs, my pelvis,” she says. “I didn’t feel it, but I heard it. I thought: ‘Oh, shit. That’s my spine.’”

She believes that what saved her was that the ground was soft. Plus she had some experience of gymnastics and yoga, which might have helped her move with the impact. But there was nothing she could have done that would have improved her chance of survival. “It’s just luck and circumstances.”

She remembers feeling the elephant’s short, bristly hair against her skin; the way it blocked out the sun as it went to roll over her again. She braced herself for the end, for her skull to be crushed.

Instead the shadow passed. “The next thing I remember was light,” she says. “There was sun on my face – and the elephant wasn’t there.”

The mahout reappeared by her side. He dragged Jones to her feet and then over a fence to some nearby huts. The numbness finally gave way to all-encompassing and overwhelming pain. “Everything just started screaming at me,” Jones says.

As she was laid out on her back on an outside table, Berni and others from the group pulled up in a pickup truck. Berni – Bernadette Johnen, now based in Kingston-upon-Thames – remembers the sight vividly. Her first reaction was relief: Jones was covered in dirt and dishevelled, with a bloodshot eye, but had no visible wounds. She was even talking. “But as soon as you touched her, or went anywhere near, she started screaming,” says Berni.

Chiang Mai was more than an hour’s drive down the mountain. Every bump in the dirt road was agonising. At the hospital in Chiang Mai, Jones was given painkillers and X-rays revealed that her pelvis had been cracked from top to bottom. She also had a broken collarbone, three fractured ribs and internal bleeding – but didn’t need surgery.

Jones’s call to her parents from the hospital was her first call home since setting out on her big trip, less than a week earlier. Sedated with morphine, she told her dad in Warwickshire “an elephant broke my glasses” before handing the phone over to Berni.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/17/the-elephant-i-was-riding-threw-me-then-rolled-over-me-like-a-steamroller-all-my-bones-broke-at-once