Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

okay. some of you may think that i am an idiot who can't spell, who couldn't beat my way out of a baggie with a baseball bat. But i want i want to be endorsed for this little piece of non-fiction.

THE ELEPHANT ON ELEPHANT ISLAND

The last time I saw an elephant was on Elephant Island, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. They were all standing there. I mean they were too massive to move much and on top of that they were in stalls like horses. It was the one nearest me that caught my eye. In it I knew I saw wisdom, which is why the Thai cherish them, I think. An elephant’s eye seems to know everything. The one I was looking into the eye of at the moment was on a chain. At a chain that any elephant knows wouldn’t hold it. I kept that in my as I approached. Thoughts of being squashed by an elephant may have shown in my eye and the elephant appeared to grin at me and at such a ridiculous thought. It was a little sad seeing all those fantastic creatures cooped up like that. I thought of how it once was, when they roamed the forests free. Now-harnessed and not needed for what they were harnessed for in the first place, a sad situation at that, they are paraded through streets ‘begging’ for food. They are too expensive to keep.

     I guess the lucky ones drag logs up from the ravines or out of a swamp. Even in Bangkok, I see them. For twenty baht, they get to eat. And what a site-an elephant in the city! Walking down the street. People make way for them. That’s for sure. There swaying trunks sometimes goose women and lift their skirts, startling them as they make their way down the street, and then one might come across a woman, holding a naked baby and begging for a treat. The baby isn’t the woman’s. It has been rented for a day. Maybe the mother works, I don’t know. And then as the elephant passes beneath a pedestrian overpass, I am reminded of a guy I once saw on one-a guy with half an inch of mold growing on his naked torso and guy with no legs dragging himself through an outdoor market in the rain. Pulling himself through five inches of mud with a sort of breaststroke that only he truly understood.

     Perhaps the elephant knows of all these things. Maybe it is here to remind us of who we are. I don’t know what the guy in the mud may have done to deserve a fate like this. Was it in another life? Had he been sentenced to hell? Or was he waiting there in market mud as a test for each who walked by? Was God waiting to see if someone might stop and help? Was each soul being tested as it walked past, perhaps feeling pity, and then buying a kilo of oranges. A lot of us failed the test that day-for all I know the guy is still there. I failed it myself. I continued walking with the thought in my head-something about humanity that allows us to pass on by a stranger without legs, wriggling his way through rain and mud. I always have kept that emotion within me. I am only watching and seeing. I write it all down. But there is something in me that wants to help people in these situations. I think will. 

by Neel Madison Wain