Royalty, elephants and an iPod

By Panduka Senanayake

Mastering technology can be a challenge, and none would be spared, including Royalty, as was evident during a very hush-hush recent visit to Sri Lanka by a couple with close connections to the British monarchy.

The visit was by the Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. The couple was on a private visit to the island, which is recovering from a near 30-year-old conflict and is trying to bolster its economy by showcasing its unique wildlife, historical and geographical attractions to woo tourists.

Prince Michael is a cousin to both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Christened Michael George Charles Franklin, he was born on 4 July (America’s Independence Day) 1942, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of his godfathers.

The somewhat controversial Princess Michael’s website traces her ancestry to Diane de Poitiers, along with Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette and William the Conqueror.

The patron of several wildlife societies and trusts, she is a writer, historian, lecturer, interior designer and art consultant.

The couple was visiting Sri Lanka’s world renowned orphanage for elephants at Pinnawela, halfway between Colombo and the hill capital of Kandy. Started in 1975 by the Department of Wildlife on a 25 acre coconut plantation the orphanage was mainly designed to afford care and protection to the many baby elephants found in the jungle without their mothers.

In most of these cases the mother had either died or been killed in an ongoing human-elephant conflict. From an original herd of five baby elephants, the population in the orphanage has now risen to well over 80, making it one of the biggest and much visited elephant orphanages in the world by both local and foreign visitors.

According to one of the local escorts to the Royal couple, the Princess was quite an imposing woman and very actively involved with conservation activities in Africa and quite knowledgeable about elephants.

Like all tourists and visitors to the orphanage, the Royal couple took photographs of the elephants and themselves with the elephants. It was when his turn came to take photographs of the Princess with the elephants that the newly acquired iPod proved a challenge to royalty, said the Sri Lankan.

The totally informal, typical absentminded old royal had been rebuked several times by the Princess because he just could not take a good picture of her feeding the elephants... because he kept pressing the wrong buttons on his iPod!