Climbing onto a bare-backed elephant is the easy bit. Grab an ear in one hand and a fistful of flesh in the other, step on the animal's foot and thigh and throw yourself across its back, which seems larger than most Hong Kong apartments. Staying on is more difficult.
Sitting between shoulder blades that roll like a gentle swell, it feels, at first, like trying to balance on a ball - a 3-metre-high, 3-tonne ball. Slipping from side to side, with your knees tucked behind the elephant's ears, your groin stretches like a rubber band and your hips feel on the verge of dislocating. Even worse is the animal's wiry hair, poking into places no elephant hair rightly should.
'The mahouts all get the itchy bottom,' one worker at the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre assures me, and for the first time in three days I feel as though I'm one of them. We share a rash, if nothing else.
In northern Thailand, 30km north of Lampang, the centre is the country's premier elephant training and preservation facility. Established in 1992, it is home to about 50 beasts, operates the country's first and foremost elephant hospital, holds daily tourist shows and stables more than half of Thailand's royal elephants. It also conducts live-in courses, offering visitors the opportunity to live and work as a mahout, or elephant keeper, walking in raw and walking out with a raw hide.
For three days I'm apprenticed to Ta, a mahout of 10 years' standing. Look Khang, a 15-year-old wrinkled beauty, is his elephant, and briefly mine too. Together, we are Dumbo and Dumber.
Working beside us are a host of mahouts, real and make-believe. Stockbrokers Aaron and Jack are experiencing a bull market of a different kind while serial mahouts Jens and Hannie are on their fourth stay at the centre.