I've always loved the Harper's Index, so I thought I'd try to do a "trip by the numbers" section for our team. Wendy, Karen and I brainstormed on the plane home and came up with some of these statistics representing our team experience. Enjoy! 5 - Number of types of pork products that can be integrated into one bowl of soup in Thailand 5 - Number of Imodium tablets consumed on the trip 2 - Number of boxes of cold medicine consumed by our team 6 - Number of bugs eaten 1 - Number of likely insane tuk-tuk drivers we encountered [View Full Entry]

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We're heading home! Just a quick note to let you know we're leaving the Tokyo Airport in a little while after a great, wonderful, educational trip. I will upload the photos to the past blog entries and also try to add some video clips, so check back in the next couple of days for updates. I will also add the last couple of days to the blog list. To everyone at ENV (Vietnam) and Wildaid Thailand, THANK YOU! Thanks for the great in situ work you do, as well as for your efforts to make us feel at home. We truly [View Full Entry]

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After visiting the Khao Khew Open Zoo, Karen, Wendy and I headed back to Bangkok and met with our friends at WildAid one last time. They showed us some of the fantastic PSAs they're airing alerting people to the impacts of the wildlife trade. One of the biggest efforts they're making in that area focuses on China and the Olympics, so they have many celebrities and Olympians who have participated in their ads. Since we had to leave for the airport at 2:30 am, we just decided to stay up all night. We wandered around an evening market and snacked our [View Full Entry]

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Today culminated in actual contact with Clouded leopard cubs! We headed out to the Khao Kheow Open Zoo a couple of hours outside of Bangkok to visit the Clouded leopard breeding program our zoo supports. Our colleague Andy has relieved the project manager at the facility for the past few years. (Click here or go to www.pdza.org and scroll down to Adventures in Thailand to read about some of Andy's experiences this year -- not a lot of sleep, but plenty of Clouded leopard cubs to keep him on his toes!) They currently have 29 Clouded leop [View Full Entry]

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A trip to Thailand wouldn't be complete without a tiny bit (to say the least) of exposure to the King. His presence is everywhere - framed photos in restaurants and homes, huge images on billboards, people running around in bright yellow shirts in his honor. They even have a big framed picture of him at the ranger substation we camped at in the forest! The Thais love their royalty, but the King in particular. They even sell "Long Live the King" rubber bracelets (a la Live Strong) - Wendy bought us each one at 7-11! He's [View Full Entry]

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It's not every day an ex-poacher demonstrates animal trapping techniques used to catch endangered species, but we were lucky enough to meet Kuman, a former poacher who now works with the WildAid Community Outreach Team near Khao Yai National Park. Kuman is the village leader of a very poor village on the edge of the park where at one point most of the adults in the village (including the women) were poachers. They took from the forest what they needed to survive in addition to what they could find to make money. As you walk through the village, old men still [View Full Entry]

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Since Kanda’s big exam is coming up, we left her alone for a day to study and hired Mr. Jeep (the birdwatching guide we’d met a few days earlier) to guide us for our day off. It was our only meeting-free day in the park and we wanted to try to see some wildlife before heading back to Bangkok. If I could make an action figure, it would be of Mr. Jeep. At 5 foot 4 or so, he was a fairly small man with a shiny, bright smile and shoulder length glossy, wavy black hair that looked like it could [View Full Entry]

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In the morning, the rangers fixed some more great food with the leftovers from the night before, then we headed off into the forest to check the camera trap to see if it had captured any new images. We left the camera with 3 images exposed, but when Kanda checked it this morning, 16 photos had been taken!! Down the path in the salt lick, two more cat tracks were found…and they were fresh! We hoped she’d take the trap down and get the film developed, but she ended up sticking to her plan and re-mounted the trap and put artificial [View Full Entry]

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Thursday - An Ode to Thai Park Rangers Man, I love these guys. Why? 1) They protect wildlife from poachers with very little pay. 2) They can cook. 3) They can sing. 4) They set up tents. 5) They carry things. 6) They have guns and we’re in the forest with some potentially big and scary animals in addition to poachers who have guns. 7) They write their own songs about the national park (and they even have one about their own substation!) 8) Even though they said that “farang” (that’s us white foreigners) can’t squat like Thais because we have [View Full Entry]

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We spent most of the morning preparing our provisions for the trip to the substation and moving our things out of our cold shower and no toilet paper rooms and into Kanda’s room for storage. We met up at the office and Kanda left us with a video camera and a camera trap with the task of figuring out how to make it work. Although we came close, we never did figure out how to set it (and she didn’t know since it had only been used once), so we ended up taking a small film camera to use in the [View Full Entry]

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