A few hours from now, I'll be lashed atop a 7,000-lb. Indian elephant wearing a pith helmet, excreting beer.

There will be three of us, actually. Me, my elephant and my mahout, the Assamese-speaking Nepali man who bare-backs the elephant's neck and steers it with his bare feet and a bamboo stick. We will be on a 100-meter field in Bardia National Park in the Far-Western Terai district of Nepal.

We'll all be crashing about in search of a white ball and a gold medal. This is the World Elephant Polo Association's championship tournament, held in a landlocked Maoist republic, sandwiched between the two most populous nations on earth, and home to the world's 10 tallest mountains.

How did I get here? Well, have you ever seen "Quantum Leap"?

The Backstory
It started four years ago. I was working at a now-defunct magazine and bonded with my new boss, Bill, over mutual hangovers. (Cue friendship.) A few months later, Bill went to Nepal to cover this bizarre elephant polo championship tournament. Enchanted by the spectacle, and patriotically irked by the lack of an American team, he became Douglas MacArthur and vowed to return -- as an entrant.

But affording the entrance fee and assembling sponsors proved challenging. Years passed until, at a bar in Antigulla, a female stranger asked Bill about the elephant design on his bag. "Oh, this old thing? Picked it up at a merchandise tent on an air-strip-turned-elephant-polo-pitch in a Nepalese jungle." The woman, Melanie, almost instantaneously became the manager of the nascent American elephant polo team. ("I need sponsors," Bill said. "I sneeze sponsors," replied Mel.)

The Team
Bill proceeded to recruit a group of wildly disparate clowns with co-extensive drinking problems. (Among them: me. The token Jew? No. There's nothing token about me.) Melanie and Bill found sponsors.

By the time the New York Blue left Manhattan for Southwestern Nepal last year, we had a tailwind of media attention. The NY Post, NY Observer and CBS's "Sunday Morning" show keyed in. The latter sent a crew to cover one of our "practices," where we rode atop SUVs in a wind-swept parking lot in Queens hitting softballs with retrofitted PVC pipes. It was quite the spectacle, and we left America with a lot of goodwill and requests not to die. No one expected us to win anything.

The Tournament
Only we did win. We won the silver medal after an insanely competitive championship match that ended in sudden death overtime. My team suffered major injuries -- Chip took a mallet to the face and suffered a massive concussion, Rob got his leg caught in an opposing elephant's ropes that were trundling past. The laws of physics being what they are, Rob broke his knee. We all came home with mild cases of alcohol poisoning.

I figured we'd never go back.

And that was fine with me. I'm broke and just barely employed. I am a freelancer in the (ha!) print media industry, which is like being a horse-and-buggy repair man in Henry Ford's Detroit. I couldn't afford to go back even if I wanted to. And even if I had the chance to go back, I have no health insurance! Should I break my knee like Rob, I'll be coming home to sky-high medical bills or a lifelong limp. So I figured, that's that.

But that's never that. Not until you're dead. Suddenly, with only weeks to go until this year's tournament, Melanie and Bill got bees in their respective bonnets. Calls were made. Sponsors were cobbled together. Suddenly, I was being asked, "Bryan, do you want to go back to Nepal?"

The Return
So there we'll be, this holiday: beast, man and idiot. All around us a carnival rages. Backpacking hippies and millionaires and foreign ambassadors and British military personnel crowd the bar tent while we take the field. Surrounding the adults are Nepali schoolchildren in brightly colored uniforms shouting and dancing. An enormous bull elephant with great crescent tusks thunders into the middle of the field. On his back, a small wicker booth which contains a referee and, if the match is important enough, a commentator complete with wireless microphone.

The butterflies in my stomach are huge, prehistoric. I'm squeezing the ropes across my thighs, my legs outfitted in chaps, my feet (covered by blue Chuck Taylors, our team shoe) are hooked into loops of rope that act as stirrups. I grip my mallet. My mahout rests his bare feet against the elephant's ears. I'll make eye contact with my fellow teammate who shares the defensive position with me. We'll look at each other and smile at the absurdity, but then we'll make serious faces because we're not f**king around. The fear will be there, but it'll be banished by that old motivator, peer pressure. I don't want to let the New York Blue down.

The whistle will sound, and the white ball will be dropped from the referee elephant. The two striker elephants, typically small and shifty, will charge. Their mahouts will scream in Assamese and each player will bring their mallets sweeping down with as much force and precision as they can. The cluck of a struck ball will coax a cheer from the children.

And I'll try not to die.

Bryan Abrams is a journalist and idiot who lives and works in New York City.