You are looking in the right direction, with a minor error. The HTTP request and forwarding port don't match (9200 and 9201).
You can either update your code to query on port 9201, or change the ssh tunnel to:
ssh -L9201:127.0.0.1:9200 r_chau02@sshserver
This will make ES available on localhost:9200 (assuming tunneling is enabled on the server, and ES is listening on the sshserver address).