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Lyle's Fruit Bats (Pteropus lylei)
this is a female carrying her baby on her belly For my first day in Bangkok I went to see some bats. I had recently discovered that outside Bangkok in the nearly-impossible-to-pronounce town of Chachoengsao there is a Buddhist temple called Wat Pho Bang Khla which is home to a large colony of Lyle's fruit bats. I have seen this species before at Siem Reap in Cambodia (in 2006 and then again this February) but I thought it would be a good plan to see them in Thailand as well. Because why not.
I did some googling to find directions to the temple. The original place I had read about it (on Mammalwatching) had said the temple was just named Wat Pho, which is actually a temple in the middle of Bangkok. From more reliable internet sources, like Tripadvisor (!), I found out the real name of the temple and where it was located. Getting there sounded easy, although it is quite a long way outside Bangkok so you'd
really want to see the bats because it's basically an all-day trip.
First I took the river boat from Pier 13 (by the Khao San Road area) down to Pier 4 for 15 Baht, and walked to the Hualamphong train
station which takes about 15 minutes or so. The trains to Chachoengsao seem to run every two hours. I got to the station at about 9.30am and the next train was at 10.10 so I didn't have to wait long. I did almost miss the train though, because I was sitting in the station day-dreaming and when I randomly looked at my watch it was already 10.05! The train takes an hour and a half to reach Chachoengsao and it only costs 13 Baht! That's about fifty NZ cents! This was a really cheap day I must say. The entire cost of transport from leaving my guesthouse to getting back to the guesthouse was just 104 Baht, or roughly NZ$4.
Most of the trip is through rice-fields and farmland. After spending the last three months in the dead-zone which is Vietnam, it was amazing seeing birds
everywhere. Not just a few birds, but large flocks of birds of all kinds. Most of the smaller ones were unidentifiable but there were spotted doves, red collared doves, zebra doves, plaintive cuckoos. At one station was a colony of baya weavers. In the flooded paddies were literally hundreds of Javan pond herons,
cattle egrets, great and intermediate and little egrets, lesser whistling ducks, jacanas, gallinules, openbill storks, even a flock of painted storks at one point. I saw 26 species just by looking out of the train windows, which is more than you'd normally see in a full day's birding in most of Vietnam.
Once at the Chachoengsao train station it is really easy to get to the temple. Of course, I made it as convoluted as possible in order to find out what that easy way is. I do it on purpose to provide accurate travel information...
The temple is about 20km outside Chachoengsao at a place called Bang Khla. From the internet I had only found information on people going there in their own cars, by taxis (500 Baht return, apparently), and lastly by what should have been the cheapest option, a river boat from the Tawan-Ok Plaza Pier which goes up-river to the temple. A songthaew from the station to the Plaza costs 8 Baht but I walked it because the only songthaews by the station were empty. Sometimes when you ask at an empty songthaew if they go to a certain place the driver says yes,
but then when you arrive you find out that you've inadvertently hired the whole vehicle and now have to pay a huge fee. I wanted to avoid any such mistake! It was about 2.5km to the river, no detours, nice and easy. It took me a while to find the right building because nobody spoke any English, but eventually I found it, couldn't find the pier, managed to ascertain that it was actually on the
other side of the river, and then got taken to a songthaew which I was told goes to the temple for 8 Baht. Huh.
The songthaew set off - all the way back along the road I'd walked up, past the train station, and stopped at the bus station which is just nearby. The driver pointed at a bright orange songthaew and said
that one goes to Bang Khla. And that's how I found the easy way to get there! Basically, from the train station you just walk to the bus station (or take a songthaew or motorbike or tuktuk) and find the orange songthaews which go to Bang Khla. They cost 20 Baht, it takes about forty minutes, and they stop about five
minutes walk from the temple. Easy-peasy!
Although I was looking forward to seeing the bats I was also a bit unsure about whether it was worth having spent so much time to get there, given that I've seen Lyle's fruit bats before. It was totally worth it! The colony is huge and because it is inside the grounds of the temple it is completely protected. The bats at Siem Reap (in the Royal Gardens) are high up in the tops of tall trees so you need binoculars to see them properly. The bats at Wat Pho Bang Khla are in low trees, often no more than six or seven metres off the ground. The noise was incredible, constant screeching and screaming from the bats, and with that characteristic pungent bat odour filling the air. Lots of the bats had babies, of all ages. I spent about an hour there all together. I very much recommend this place to anyone who likes bats.
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