ห้ามจอดควาย - No Buffalo Parking

(The picture came from a Thai music website. I'm not sure if it is the cover of a commercial album or a self made album.)

I'd been in Thailand over a month this trip before I saw my first Kwai - or water buffalo. This was a day or so after I saw my first elephant. When I first came to Thailand, you could almost see kwai from the airplane landing at Don Muang airport, which was surrounded by rice paddies then and kwai were everywhere. Now they have been replaced by 'iron kwai' or tractors. The pictures below are from 1967 or 1968, from the pictures I digitized and left in Kaphaengphet for the school museum last weekend.





This farmer walked his Kwai by my house every day. Here, one of the students who lived with the teachers is testing it.








This was one of the most common sights in Thailand then. Kids swimming with and bathing the kwai.









And here's why everyone had a kwai, and why they don't today. They were used to help plow the fields. Now there are tractors. That's progress and people don't have to work as hard and they can produce more. But
you don't have (well most of us wouldn't) have the same kind of relationship with a tractor as you would with your Kwai.




According to Bing, these kwai, which we passed coming back from the land meeting Wednesday, are on their way to the slaughter house, the main use for kwai today.














Elephants weren't as common a sight in the old days. They too played an important work role - getting timber - mainly large teak logs - from the forest to the river where it could be floated to a town, or to a road where it could be trucked out. Now the elephants you see are beggars, with their out of work human companions.

The one we saw was walking down the street in downtown Chiang Mai. We were in a vehicle going the other way and I couldn't get a picture. Yesterday was National Elephant Day.

Back when I was teaching in Kamphaengphet I asked my students to let me know when the elephants - which traveled the country - were in the area clearing teak logs. Here are a couple from the digitized batch I took when my students took me out to the forest to see them at work.




































Yes, that's yours truly, testing his elephant handling skills.


Boy, looking at the old slides compared to the new picture, I'm going to have to pull that old Pentax out again when I get home.