Trunk and tail light tale

A nightly parade of elephants along Bangkok’s famed tourist strip make a mockery of the city’s legislation.

It’s that time of the year when there are more elephants wandering around Sukhumvit, in downtown Bangkok, than you could ever hope to sight in Khao Yai National Park.

Admittedly, tourists think they are cute and there is nothing more likely to impress Aunt Martha, back home, than a snapshot standing next to the original Nelly the elephant.

Regular beer drinkers at the famed Soi 8 Bar hang around long enough to see Nelly three or four times a night and conclude she is female and very pregnant.

Then there is a tiny tot in tow, twice my height mind you, and his huge older sister. They both trundle through the lanes with flickering cycle lights attached to their tails.

We could muse all night about how these noble creatures get across the six-lane Sukhumvit race track without taking out a couple of motor cycle taxis.  But they do go to and fro almost at leisure from Soi 11, where the Ambassador Hotel resides, to Soi 8. Traffic is already at a standstill, but the conundrum is how they manage to squeeze through the gaps in stationary metal. Perhaps they wait for the traffic lights to go green?

On the way to the traffic lights, they appear to make a few sorties in Soi Nana probably encouraged by the notion that this sleazy stretch of real estate is in fact some kind of circus. What a miserable sight that turns out to be for an out-of-work elephant. The whole place is jammed with redundant workers from Europe who nurse a beer all night, while choking on traffic fumes at their street-side bars.

This whole scenario is made up. There are no elephants in Bangkok, we all know that.  A law was passed years ago forbidding them to enter the capital. We also know that Soi Nana and the surrounding lanes teem with uniformed and plain clothes police officers, who are there to uphold the law. They have never seen an elephant passing their air-conditioned box.

We can only assume that after a few chilled draft beers we are hallucinating, or the elephants we see on the tourist strip are inflatable replicas that are deflated in seconds, rolled up and hidden in a suitcase if a police officer is in the vicinity.

I have no idea how long it would take to inflate them and motivate them to trundle down the street, trumpeting their annoyance at motor cycles? 

This is a land that loves elephants. They are viewed with reverence as a noble creature and symbol of the nation.  But today they are a sad sight.

Perhaps the Ministry of Tourism and Sports should spend part of its huge bounty to secure the future for these animals, by rehabilitating them and placing them in the care of a secure park where they can live out their remaining days in peace.

I am not referring to life in the wild or an alternative career in a tourist park circus playing football.

They should be resident in a managed park, such as the one in Lampang, in North Thailand, where visitors can pay to admire and study them up close in a relatively natural but safe environment funded by the Ministry of Tourism and Sports.

Too many for comfort

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