“Single gray female, bright, responsible, good job, seeks male for friendship, possible long-term relationship.”
So might the ad read, if there were any conceivable place to publish it. Samboh, the Wat Phnom elephant, is lonely.
At 40, the 5-ton female could still have children, said her owner, Sin San. He’s been looking for a likely mate for her, but so far, no luck.
“She’s very clever,” he saidproudly. “She understands everything you say. She just can’t talk.”
When Sin San met Samboh in 1962, he was 7 years old and she was about 2.
The tiny female with pink, freckled ears was adorable and a popular addition to his father’s herd of seven elephants.
Cute as those freckles were, they didn’t stop his father from cutting a notch in her right ear as a sign of ownership.
Samboh had been captured in the Oral Mountains of Kompong Speu. Female elephants at that time were not used for heavy labor such as logging and, in the normal course of events, she would have grown up to perform in religious and civic ceremonies, decked out in fancy harness.
But there was nothing normal about Cambodia in the 1970s, for people or for elephants. Sin San was 20 when the Khmer Rouge came to power, and Samboh was 15.
He had cared for her every day since he was 8 years old. He would prepare her food, fetch her water, take her swimming, make sure that she learned her manners and talking—talking to her all the time.
When the Khmer Rouge moved into Kompong Speu, the jungle fighters knew nothing about elephants, Sin San said.
They forced his father’s adult elephants into a circle and tied them.
When the elephants became hungry and thirsty, they became agitated, crying out and struggling against the ropes.
All they wanted was food and water, Sin San said, but the Khmer Rouge didn’t know that. Instead, the panicked soldiers shot and killed them.
“This one is still alive, because she was still young and small, and the Khmer Rouge chief loved her,” Sin San said.
But the Khmer Rouge allowed no one to own anything, and it wasn’t long before Sin San was faced with a heart-wrenching decision.
The Khmer Rouge told him he was spending too much time caring for Samboh, and they needed him to work in the rice fields. He was told he would have to give up his elephant.
But Sin San was afraid she would die the way the elephants had, because no one knew how to care for her. He pleaded with the soldiers to let her stay with him.
“It’s up to you,” he was told. “You can keep the elephant and we will kill you. Or you can give her up and live.”
Sin San struggled with the decision, finally telling himself, “Maybe, just maybe, she can survive.”
Sin San went into the rice fields and Samboh disappeared.
“I don’t know where she went, or what happened to her,” he said.
As soon as the Khmer Rouge were driven from power, he and his father set out to look for her. “In 1979 my father asked everywhere about her,” he said.
They finally found her in Pursat province, in the care of an elderly man.
She was terribly thin and sick, but they knew it was her from the notch in her freckled ear.
“If she’s yours, what’s her name?” asked the old man.
“Samboh!” Sin San’s father said. And the elephant knew him.
Today Samboh earns her keep ferrying tourists around Wat Phnom, $5 a ride for foreigners, 10,000 riel for Cambodians.
She has been giving rides since 1983, ambling down the Tonle Bassac each night to sleep on the vacant land near the Cambodiana Hotel, although development there could soon push her out, and she will have to find a new bed.
She is plump and sleek and hugely popular, with admirers stopping by to buy her bananas even when they don’t want rides.
Sin San’s father died in 1998, and now Sin San is managing the elephant’s career full-time.
He has asked Prime Minister Hun Sen to find her a male elephant. He has talked to the people at the Phnom Tamau Zoo and has located a likely prospect in Mondolkiri, but he doesn’t have the $10,000 the male would cost.
She’s a great girl, Sin San said, friendly, easy-going, maybe a little moody once in a while but she gets over it.
He tugs on her huge speckled ear, and she gives him a soft look from her intelligent brown eye.
