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Published: August 27th 2006
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I'm back staying at Prakorb's House, in the same room even!
On the front page of the Bangkok Post this morning was a picture of a 'Platinvim alligator fish', the only one of its kind in Thailand and valued at 2 million Baht. Its at the Seacon Pet Planet exhibition of rare aquatic animals. Sounded like my kind of place, but no-one I asked could tell me anything about it. So I just looked it up on the internet a few minutes ago and its at Seacon Square (silly me, thinking Seacon was short for Sea Convention) from 25 August to 3 September. I'm off to Khao Yai National Park tomorrow for about a week; hopefully I'll be back in time to see the expo before its over. It should be simple to get to Khao Yai, just get a bus to Pak Chong then a songthaew (that's like a truck taxi) to the Park entrance, but you know what I'm like with getting places simply!
Also in the Bangkok Post was an item about a Cambodian monk in Phnom Penh who stripped naked and ran through the streets before passing out in a suburban garden after
a night of drinking rice wine laced with toads. That's right. He's been "asked" to leave the monastery.
Today I went to Lumphini Park, which is a small lakey park in the middle of Bangkok. There were lots of water monitors there. Not monster ones like some of the ones I saw on the river to Taman Negara but still pretty sizeable ones (big enough to eat a Burmese cat!). I have not yet been able to get a good photo of a monitor because they tend to run away from me (yes, I'm THAT scary; even the dragons are afraid of me), but the ones at Lumphini Park are obviously used to people because while not entirely approachable they could still be relied upon to stay fairly unmoved if having their photos taken with a zoom lens. Of course, I didn't have my zoom lens with me today. Dummy that I am. When I get back to Bangkok I'll go back and get some photos. Assuming they haven't all disappeared, which they probably will have. Birds at the park were all commoners (standard rule of thumb: any bird seen in a city park will automatically be a
common species), but I got two new common birds, streak-eared bulbul and Asian pied starling.
After Lumphini I headed for the Chatuchak Weekend Market. I was looking for the animal section but unfortunately met the book section first. Much much time later I emerged. So many books, but expensive. A second-hand not-in-mint-condition "Carnivorous Mammals of Southeast Asia" for 800 Baht -- that's about $40. I didn't buy anything, but I sure wanted to! The market sells everything: books, plants, animals, clothes, ornaments, deep-fried ice-cream and also the more unusual-sounding "antique ice-cream" (very nice too it was). Its a maze of stalls and alleyways and even with a map it took me a while to actually find the animals (maps! huh!). It turned out there were lots and lots and lots of puppies (mostly appearing to be pure-breds surprisingly) but it was a job finding anything else. It was all domestic pets it seemed, which was good: budgies and doves (zebras and spot-necks, probably wild-caught), dwarf hamsters, dwarf hedgehogs, guinea pigs and rabbits. I couldn't find any fish but they were there because I saw a guy on the train afterwards with a bag of guppies. Then I came
across a stall selling baby squirrels. It was pretty heart-wrenching. I figured there were probably fifty squirrels there, some of them not even weaned yet. They seemed to be mostly variable squirrels but there were also Himalayan striped squirrels (remember Tamiops?) and Berdmore's palm squirrels and probably others. Most were in little cages but others were tied by ribbons round their necks to the top. I thought they were toys at first. A man opened one cage and dragged one of the squirrels out by the ribbon and dangled it by its neck until it climbed onto his hand. Even some of the other passing tourists looked pretty distressed at the stall. I found another stall soon after which may have been worse because the squirrels were dressed in little woolly hats. When I started taking photos at this second stall (which had a sign saying "no video") the woman started yelling at me going "No, very bad, very bad!" "Yeah, so is keeping squirrels like that" I retorted. I left the market feeling very sad.
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Justin
non-member comment
dirty bastards
u should of put a rope around the squirel stall keepers neck and tied them down to the curb drain and let trafic run them over or street kids urinate on them. On a brighter note love the site even though im not a birdie , u should keep it up when u come back and add NZ stuff now that u have the sexy camera P.S didnt i see that puppy lover sighn on the back of tobies car?