Reptile Day

Well, just five days left in Bangkok before the whole adventure is over. These last segments of the adventure dance less to the frenetic beat of the CavTours experience and have more of a wind down feel. In fact, the last days are unplanned, dithering as we are between jumping on a coach and going somewhere or sitting in the cool winter Thai sun by the swimming pool (knowing that this is the last we’ll see of the big yellow thing for a few months). So we will not feel too disappointed about missed opportunities, we’ve tried to do both.

Monday was a Reptile Day. In the morning we jumped on the skytrain to Bangkok’s snake farm. A bit disappointing as, when we were here 10 years ago, they’d tip an 8 foot king cobra out of a sack in front of a class of brightly kitted-out children and keep it occupied with a waving foot. This morning all the venom milking was done by four people behind wall to wall safety glass in an auditorium. In fairness we got the wrong part of the day for the snake show so maybe it was a bit more active in the afternoon. To give an idea of what we probably missed, click here. (I hope this works as doing the hyperlinks this way is less messy than copy and pasting the whole, long-winded URL into the blog. Either right click to open in a new window or press the Back button when finished. I think.)

Anyway, from there back to the skytrain and as far as it would go. The idea was to go down to Samut Prakarn province and visit the crocodile farm but my Thai isn’t so hot (no, really!) and the average taxi driver can’t really be arsed to decipher most idiot ferangs. Luckily, the lad had a sense of humour and my wildly scissoring arm movements and vocal imitations of large dinosaur-like creatures did the trick so 20 klicks and 3 quid later we were at the zoo. As expected, there were lots of crocs as there were local boys willing to put their hands and heads into open mouths for a few thrown Baht (I confess that, while videoing said exercise, the camera jumped when the bloody thing closed its jaws with a Whoomph, narrowly missing his appendage). The whole place turned out to be a sizeable zoo with some large and healthy tigers, leopards and lions; at my age I’m not as keen on zoos as I once was having seen too much maltreatment but the coats on all the animals looked healthy and there were plenty of young about. I did, however, draw the line at watching the elephant show with the elephants all dressed up and walking on two legs; I like elephants as real people, not Disney characters.

Yesterday, we split forces with Linda and Carolyn shopping and visiting famous houses and me sitting by the pool to finish up a rather long sci-fi book I had been working my way through. OK, I did get off my sorry ass about three in the afternoon and took the camera bag for a walk but it wasn’t entirely successful: the light was from the wrong direction on the Wat I had targeted (should have gone in the morning); the Wat itself (Wat Benjamabophit – the marble temple - looks nice here doesn't it?) was covered in scaffolding and green gauze; I couldn’t find my way into Dusit Park (which was Plan B on the itinerary) except through the zoo entrance (and I was all zooed out); and I’d run out of change so had to walk about 3 klicks to the nearest skytrain line. Still, when I got back to Sukumvhit it was happy hour in the Robin Hood so all was not lost. In the evening we all congratulated ourselves on our respective adventures at the local Italian Restaurant.