albinos in Bangkok

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I managed to get to the Seacon Pet Planet exhibition today. It was almost all aquatic or reptilian creatures, and was focusing on albino animals (I think its an annual event and they have a different theme each year but I'm not sure). Seacon Square turned out to be a four-level mall rather than an actual Square, and the exhibition took up the entire centre area of the ground floor. There were albino knifefish and gars and catfish and other aquarium fish, rabbits and dwarf hedgehogs and ferrets, and even an albino Siamese crocodile and elephant-trunk snake. Also other more regularly-coloured herptiles like Budgett's frog, matamata, crocodile skink, monkey-face frog, pancake tortoise... all sorts of cool stuff. The 'Platinvim alligator fish' was an alligator gar with a seriously deformed snout (all twisted sideways like it had been punched in the side of the head). There were absolutely tonnes of people there, I think more just because it was a mall on Saturday than for any particular regard for the exhibition itself. I ate at a possibly overpriced but very yummy pizza place called 'The Pizza Company' where their motto is "you can almost taste it". Not the best line for a restaurant. Then I wandered into a book shop, found a book on reptiles of Thailand and identified my two mystery snakes from Taman Negara: the one that pretended it was a cobra was a white-bellied rat snake Zaocys fuscus (related to the cave racer that it looked kind of similar to) and the little orange one was a baby blue-necked keelback Macropisthodon rhodomelas. After the Seacon event I went over to Lumphini Park and got some passable photos of water monitors. And that was my day.

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