Recently, In The Wild

As one single panda cub keeps on taking the breath away from a whole nation with breaking news such as when she opened her left and when her right eye, the kingdom’s official animal, the elephant, falls into ever deeper oblivion. The panda earns the Chiang Mai zoo millions. Elephants cost millions.

The little panda is so cute. Hence elephants have become a menace. They roam Bangkok’s streets begging for food and recently, while driving to a temple near the Burmese border, a 2 1/2 hours drive away from Bangkok, on the beautiful highway 3219 from Hua Hin to the Pala-U waterfalls, we ran into a wild elephant.

There he was, at around tenish in the morning, breaking out of the jungle thicket and slowly marching along the road. A pick-up driver tried to tell me: slow down. But there he came, the elephant, kind of charging, speeding up in exactly our direction. What to do?

Well, didn’t really feel comfortable escaping an elephant in reverse gear. So I went from P to D and slowly slowly slowly passed the beg fella to the excitement of my wife and son while all I wasn’t really concerned about when to take the best shot. The question was rather how to overtake an elephant in a safe and orderly way.

At driving school I wasn’t told how to overtake an elephant. And a wild one that is. He looked quite peaceful. Except his watery eyes. The long and short of it: we made it.

Maybe overly anxious. As recently I saw this shot in The Nation with the byline:

Kang Krajarn National Park in Prachuab Khiri Khan’s Hua Hin asks visitors not to feed wild elephants as the animals would get familiar and hunt for food from people’s vehicles. The habit would be dangerous for both the animals and people.

Meaning … overly relaxed Thai people are feeding wild elephants from the comfort of their cars? Holy moly. Why is it that our beautiful hosts see no danger where I only see red flags all over.

But if ever our dear wild elephant would kill one of his friendly feeders … maybe all hell would break loose condemning the savagery of the wild … a wild that should have no more place in modern times, demanding to put an end to such savagery.

Or … or a wild Thai elephant would never think of harming a fellow friendly Thai.

And the moral of the story: loosen up, relax, more tolerance please.