#30 Thailand

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Happy New Years!
Firstly I have to apologize for all the pictures, especially at the zoo, but after deleting the worst of them, I had to include the fun ones. Also I now have a camera again! The Cannon people, took my 2 cameras, the one with the broken lense and the one with the broken LCD, and switched them so we now have one working camera between Laura and I. In Chiang Mai we mostly spent a lot of time with Laura's parents who work in Thailand during the winter seasons, but we also had time for some fun stuff as well.

The "Flight of the Gibbons" was a ton of fun. It is about 2 miles worth of zip lines in the tropical jungle. The longest was about a half mile and the shorter ones were like 100 or 200 feet. In all there were about 15 separate zip lines. Also included were several abseils up and down super tall trees (150 feet down even!) that were 700 years old!

The Chiang Mai Zoo was remarkably well done. Only 9 countries around the world (including the US) have a share of the 35 pandas that exist outside of China in zoos world-wide. Their 3 pandas are very cute and well cared for, the koalas were very cute as were the cats. They even had all four cats from the genus panthera [panthera pardus, panthera tigris, panthera leo, and panthera onca or the leopard, tiger, lion, and jaguire respectively). They even had white tigers were Bengal tigers with the recessive white gene as opposed to Siberian tigers which are white in the first place.

The Thai approach to prisoner reform is just about right. They hardly have a middle ground in that they either hand out long sentences that are purely punative or shorter ones that focus on rehabilitation. I went to the womens prison in Chiang Mai where the inmates gave me a wonderful foot massage. The prisoners are also taught other practical skills such as cooking, working in the restaurant and services industry and even in automotive. Those prisoners in their last 6 months of their sentence who have a record of good behavior are allowed to work with the general public. They also get to collect the massage, food, automotive money, etc into an account that they can use to get resettled after release. All in all I think it is an excellent approach to rehabilitation.

The other fun thing I did was go to Tiger Kingdom. Tigers are generally nocturnal animals and sleep more than 18 hours a day. A lot of people think the tigers in captivity are drugged since they appear so sleepy. While in places this could be true, the 31 tigers at Tiger Kingdom were generally well cared for. I played with the 4 and 12 week old tigers and even bottle fed the baby tiger!

Other than that we visited with Laura's parents, went to many Wats , outdoor markets, and sports pubs. I really enjoyed watching American Football after missing nearly the entire season thus far and going to quiz nights at the English pub, just as we did so often in DC.

ON THE HORIZON: Our Chinese contract fell through at the Jiansu school so we are back to square one but optimistically searching for new possibilities. We head next to India for 5 days, and Oman and Qatar for 7 before arriving in Beijing on the 7th. Hope everyone has a great New Years!

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Cool tiger pictures
Looks like you are having great fun.