Phruts Phungsai tosses her luxuriant mane of jet-black hair, brushes a fresh gob of elephant booger from her hot pink top, and flips open a mirror to check her make-up. She utters a piercing shriek: 'My earring! It's gone!' Within seconds the leggy beauty, who happens to be, technically, a man, is stepping delicately among steaming heaps of pachyderm poop, uttering distraught little sobs. Three cohorts in matching skin-tight jerseys emblazoned with the legend 'Screwless Tuskers' look up from their copies of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, hurriedly confer then rush onto the field to join the search. They hop and prance and poke clods of turf, but to no avail.
The rest break is over, the second chukka is looming, and Phruts is just going to have to live with a naked earlobe. She sashays over to a wooden tower with two of her fellow players in tow, clutching an outsized mallet, ready to be strapped to her massive mount.
It is a strange introduction to an odd pursuit. Elephant polo is one of the few sports, along with tiddlywinks and perhaps synchronised swimming, where the hunt for missing jewellery can be considered a highlight. To the uninitiated, elephant polo can appear a treacly, lumbering affair that proceeds in its own weird slow-motion. By the third or fourth chukka, it's a blur of flailing mallets, grubby jodhpurs, spit-polished leather and two-tonne behemoths bumping off each other like wrinkly dodgems. Add a touch of sun and several ales, and it becomes visual valium for the casual observer. It looks like the kind of lark cooked up by a bunch of public-school types after too many gin and tonics - which, of course, it is. 'We were drunk,' admits one of the sport's founding fathers, Jim Edwards, proprietor of Nepal's pukka Tiger Tops jungle lodge. 'It's hardly the sort of thing you'd think up if you were sober.'
Aficionados claim to appreciate the sport's finer points, and can spend hours engaged in passionate, well-lubricated debate over such arcana as off-side backhand shots, line drives and which society matrons are having sex with their mahouts. Tournaments are held at erstwhile outposts of empire, or anywhere within hollering distance of a cucumber sandwich and a glass of Pimm's: Nepal, India, Sri Lanka and, in this instance, Hua Hin, the sleepy beach resort south of Bangkok that is a holiday haunt of well-off Thais and the favoured residence of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
The rules are simple: two seven-minute chukkas, three players and three elephants a side, and teams switch elephants at half-time. Elongated polo mallets are used to whack a polo ball through a set of goalposts. Teams comprise the idle rich, the titled rich and the filthy rich, leavened by a moustachioed smattering of military types; double- and triple-barrelled surnames abound, and players assume noms-de-polo like 'Bombay Sapphire', 'The Silver Fox' and 'The Dark Horse of Delhi'. At least, that was until this year's King's Cup, when the face of elephant polo was forever changed with the appearance of the sport's first team of transsexuals.
'Ladies and gentlemen, the second chukka is about to begin,' announces the commentator over a crackly PA system. 'Please put your hands together for the Screwless Tuskers and Wepa Nepal.' The last turns out to be Edwards' team, comprising the old campaigner and his two sons. Up against them are four leggy and glamorous creatures of indeterminate gender assembled by an eccentric Floridian, retired lawyer and scion of a baking dynasty named Alf Leif Erickson. 'Do your best, girls,' Erickson urges his charges - katoeys in the local parlance, pre-operative transsexuals to their doctors, lady-boys to you and me.