ELEPHANTS, MONKEYS, AND MORE…

While in Ko Samui as well as Bangkok, there were an abundance of elephants.  Why, you ask?  Well, Indonesia’s symbol is a white elephant.  By the way, the term ‘white elephant comes from here.  White elephants are considered sacred and only royalty can own them AND of course the are not used for work and cost a lot to maintain.  Can’t kill’em either.  So it came to define an expensive item of no earthly use, that was hard to get rid of!

Monument of sacred WHITE elephants.

They actually use elephants for work as well as transportation, so it is a bit disconcerting to see, amidst the cars, the tuk-tuks, the trucks an elephant or two plodding down the streets!

Another small bit of information – the Thais train monkeys (macaques) to climb the coconut trees and pick the coconuts for them.  They actually send young monkeys to school to learn how to do this and the monkeys have to be male monkeys.  The female are TOO distracting. Then they retire the monkeys when they are 5 or 6 years old.  We never thought about how people picked coconuts before. However, coconuts are a staple for the Thai people as well as exporting! The island alone exports nearly 30 million a year.

Poverty?  Of course.  One thing that stands out so far is that most of southeast Asia is struggling as third world countries.  Children beg.  People live in what we would consider shacks.  And the normal bathroom is a hole in the floor.  No flushing.  No toilet paper.  Remember what I said about the USA and the Garden of Eden