The following article is taken from the Thailand English daily, The Nation. You can visit The Nation online at http://www.nationmultimedia.com. The article appeared under the Farang Affairs section and was published on December 13, 2002.

Of Elephants on City Streets

I was sitting at a noodle stall late last week slurping back some bami mudaeng when I found myself - a regular occurrence here in Bangkok - waving off a man with a bunch of bananas and an elephant in tow. It’s something most of us find ourselves doing, sometimes as many as several times in a single evening, particularly if you’re in one of the more touristed parts of town.

Except this time I found myself actually looking at the elephant. It had grey, baggy skin, rather like a long-past-use-by-date leather coat, and glazed, mournful eyes. It gave an occasional wheezy squeal - a curious sound at odds with the animal’s bulk.

My first thought - and not for the first time - was that elephants have no place on the streets of Bangkok.

As has been well documented, they’re here because of a 1989 decision to ban commercial logging, throwing thousands of the beasts out of work and into beggary. Bans aimed at keeping them out of the city limits in 1996 and early 2000 seem to have done nothing to keep them at bay. If anything, there seem to be more of them on the streets today than there were two years ago - I counted three on lower Sukhumvit while passing through the area in a taxi last week.

But my second thought, as I gazed at the animal, was how easy it is, as an expat, to become inured to the oddities of a place once you’ve been living there for a while.

Of course, when you think about it, it’s not just the elephants that have no place on the streets of a major international city. Let’s not forget the stray dogs, who continue to throng the soi and street corners despite Royal and Bangkok Metropolitan Authority initiatives to underline their plight, have them adopted by loving families or have them neutered and implanted with microchips. Worse still, what about the street urchins selling flowers and carrying out hazardous window-cleaning jobs on taxis and Benzes in between traffic light shifts?

Even tuk-tuk, which I thought something of a bizarre oddity back in 1982 when I first visited Bangkok and which somehow have managed to linger on, probably have no place on the streets of Bangkok when you think about it.

But then, the more you think about it, the odder Bangkok is. A city with a nightlife that goes places few other places in the world dare to, and yet which has been subject to a 2am curfew that has dragged on for close on two years now and shows no signs of abating. A city in which opulent shopping complexes like the Emporium and Central give way to side-soi crammed with stalls selling papaya salad and grilled chicken.

It’s a city of extremes if ever there was one. On the soi on which I live is a tiny slum of ramshackle wooden houses subdivided into a Bt1,500-a-month rooms that has somehow managed to survive in the shadow of the Emporium. I often pass the men squatting outside, shirtless, quaffing down saengsom, and in many other parts of the world I’d probably quicken my step at the sight of them. In Bangkok, I barely give them a second glance and they me.

And that’s another funny thing. Despite the extremes of wealth and poverty here, and despite our privileged status as comparatively rich farang - and even the poorest of us is well off compared to a poor Thai - Bangkok is a remarkably safe and unthreatening city.

A lot’s changed since I first flew into Bangkok two decades ago and was bewitched by the place on a soi close to the Malaysia Hotel - the backpacker’s destination of choice back in those pre-Khao San days. But the more amazing thing is what hasn’t changed. It’s as exotic and contradictory as it ever was.

And as I looked at that elephant the other night, I realised that elephants - perhaps one of the most contradictory metropolitan phenomena - are a relatively recent arrival.

I suddenly found myself thinking back to a visit by an old-time friend last year. We were eating dinner at Just One (close to the Malaysia Hotel as it happens, and a great garden restaurant to take out-of-towners) - when the inevitable elephant made its appearance.

“Oh, look, it’s an elephant!” my friend squealed in delight. “Do you think I can touch it? I’ve never touched an elephant.”

“You can probably take it for a ride home if you buy enough bananas,” I said.

But she wasn’t listening. She had already dashed off for her first experience of touching a real, live elephant.

They have no place here. But sometimes it’s good to be reminded they still are.

Chris king