Day 21 -



Thup, thup, thup...


That's the sound an elephant's ears make, flapping against its neck as it calumbers through the jungle.


Baloompa, baloompa, baloompa - a slow steady gait and a bumpy ride for me, so high up on its back.  It's sad and beautiful at the same time, these elephants - this trek I'm on.  I've never seen an elephant up close, touched one, or ridden one before.  What wondrous creatures, reminding me of Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street when I was a kid.  It's easy to see why the image of an elephant is so endearing to children as I watch our pack of six pulling on the greenery with their tusks, banging off the dirt against the ground and chewing like an elderly person with few teeth or a baby depositing something yummy in her mouth with her fist.  All its movements, slow and wise as it smiles a radiating smile as if it knows the secret to enlightenment even when its handlers occasionally beat it with a stick or bark threats that make my skin crawl.


It's hard to see these animals arrive to pick us up with the chains dangling around their necks.  The chains aren't wrapped around the elephant's neck, they're dangling like an untied scarf.  But it doesn't matter.  The image communicates to us the difficult existence of these animals in this country.  Better than seeing the baby elephants walking the chaotic streets of Bangkok, their poor owners collecting money.  Who needs who more?  I wonder.


I'm finding many things paradoxical in Thailand.  Beauty and ugliness side by side.  You can't take one without the other, it seems.  Sometimes it's really unbearable -  I've wanted to ask  a couple of young tourists to step outside, sure that my disgust would surely out beat their youth.  But I have to remind myself, I'm just visiting.


Like the lives of elephants in Thailand, the lives of many young women are just as perilous.  The sex trade - so blatant, so in your face - hence me wanting to ask certain people to step outside, it's hard for me to ignore.  At times I have found it pathetically funny - these men, some of them so obviously consumed with, God knows what - I've wanted to laugh and I would have if I could remove the desperation of the girls they're with, the desperation that poverty brings, but it can't be separated and so I can't laugh.  I've learned much more about these girls and the conditions under which they become part of the sex trade and it becomes less funny.  There isn't a shred of humour in what I now know.  Some may say that this is simply a condition of national poverty, living in a third world country or an emerging nation.  But exploitation is exploitation.  Again I wonder, who needs who more?


I close my eyes for a few minutes to listen to the buzzing of the cicadas, a perpetual background noise in this jungle, like an orchestra of kazoos, supporting the main act - the elephant's ears - thup, thup, thup, a loosely pulled drum, and I feel something untangling in my spine - my senses awakened to the sounds and scenes of nature as my body bumps up and down to the baloompa, calumber of the elephant.