6.10.12

A day at the zoo.

We weren’t sure exactly how to get there. It seemed like it should be pretty easy to just grab a tuk-tuk and go. Guess that’s not the case. Walked across the street to Pop’s ice cream shop to ask him for help. Everyone had a different idea about how we should get there. Finally, the lady next door offered to drive us (which really meant her husband would take us) for 200 baht. Sure, why not. We got in the car and, after a quick stop at 7-11 (had to get some chai yen), we started up the mountain to the zoo. Thought it would take a bit of time, with the fuss they were making about getting there and the amount of money we were charged for the ride. I think it took maybe 10 to 15 minutes.

Foreigners pay 100 baht ($3.16) for entry. That includes entry to the water park. Get out of town! The Denver Zoo charges at least $20 a person, I think, and they don’t even let you touch the animals OR have a water park. Stupid Denver Zoo.

The first exhibit we saw was the deer. Seemed to be a mixture of different types of deer. All of them fairly domesticated because you can pay 20 baht for a basket of sliced sweet potatoes and hand-feed them. They see people and immediately come to the fence. Before we even got that far, I was waylaid by a group of Muslim school girls. They asked me where I was from. “America”. “Ooooh. Can we take picture?” And then I had various pictures taken with various groups of Thai girls. I have never had strangers ask to take pictures with me. I’m like a celebrity. Pat said they are fascinated by my red hair and light eyes and fair skin. I may as well be a rare animal. The North American Red-headed Robyn.

We promptly got ourselves a golf cart. This zoo is really spread out and on a mountain, so walking was out of the question. Two hundred baht an hour. Done. I did remember to drive on the left side of the path.

First stop. Kitties! Well, Tigers. Same thing. Indochinese Tigers. They are smaller than Bengals and have different stripes. Tigers are my favorite. There were five of them. And they were totally unimpressed by us. The Siberian Tigers were beautiful. Two of them. One sleeping in the corner. The other keeping watch under a shady tree. Also, there were lions and bears. Oh my! And they were all in the same section. I think the humor was unintentional.

Patricia was very interested in the bears. They don’t have them in Australia. One of those things I never thought about before since they are such a common animal back home. I immediately recognized the Sun Bears. They saw us and came as close as they could to get some snacks. They stood on their hind feet on the edge of the water with their alert little eyes waiting for us to throw them fruit. I feel a bit bad. We didn’t feed the bears. I was always told not to.

The lioness looked thoroughly bored. We almost didn’t even noticed the male lion. He was laying behind the lioness on a slope. You could barely make out his mane behind her. Lazy bugger. Really, it was only about 9:30am. Not EVEN the hottest part of the day.

We then headed up the hill to the giraffes. Well, giraffe. It looked like they were working on the large giraffe enclosure that he/she might have shared with the zebras (which were on the map, but we saw none). Poor thing had to hang out with the ostriches instead. They were all standing at the fence. One of them constantly staring at us. The others were picking at the black netting on the inside of the fence. Weirdos.

Of course, as with all the other animals you can feed, the giraffe came right up to the fence as soon as we came around. We paid 20 baht for a basket of sliced sweet potato, small bananas and some kind of greens. The giraffe was lovely. I have never been that close to one before. I have always loved them. Their eyes are so beautiful with their long lashes. She (I choose to believe it was a girl) had such a gentle nature. We gave her the bananas and the sweet potato. The guy who sold us the food showed us how to feed the ostriches. Put the greens in your hand and then the ostrich basically stabs your hand with an open beak. No way. Those things are scary! I just held the basket out to it and let it take what it wanted. I won’t be asking for an ostrich for Christmas…

We moved up the hill and thought our battery in our golf cart was dying, so we hurried down the hill, swapped it out, paid for another hour, and then headed for the elephants. Elephants! I figured they would probably be Asian elephants. No need to import African ones. I was right. They had three of them. Only two were interested in us. One mostly stood at the fence waiting to be fed. The other one danced for her dinner. It was hilarious. She kept swaying back and forth and would cross one leg in front of the other and then switch. Like she was in a one-elephant chorus line. She’s the one I fed. No worries. Another family was there to feed her friend. We asked about the ages. One of them was 28 and the other two were 31. My age! We got some video of each of us feeding the elephants and then moved on.

A lot of the exhibits on the map weren’t in existence. I think that they are undergoing a lot of expansion (the “Afarican” and Australian exhibits were no where to be found). We did find a place to buy pineapple and sunglasses. While I was waiting for Pat to get some shades, two teeny, tiny kittens came out from under the porch, mewling at me. I picked one of them up and played with it for a little while. One of the girls who works there gave them each a chicken wing that was half their body mass. They attacked them as ferociously as eight ounces of kitten can and took care of them in pretty short order. I miss my kitties.

The “Leptile” (that’s how it was spelled on the map) exhibit mostly had turtles and terrapins. There were a few different crocodiles. Including those nasty looking ones that have the really thin snout with the long, snaggle teeth that hang out the sides of their mouths. We didn’t go in the snake house.

We drove through the “Deer Garden” to get to the “Leptile” exhibit. Free-roaming deer with cattle guards to keep them in this area. We didn’t catch their eye because it was actually feeding time for them and the guy with the hay had all their attention. While in another area of the park, there were a couple of deer wandering around. Pretty sure they outsmarted the cattle guards and weren’t supposed to be near the round-about…

We stopped off at the bird house. Outside they had an open exhibit that you could walk through with macaws and lorikeets and cockatoos and horn beaks. I am pretty sure that all but the horn beaks had their wings clipped. The horn beaks had leashes on their ankles, but they didn’t seem like they wanted to go anywhere. Just like all the other hand-fed animals here, they saw us as a meal ticket. Others had handfuls of birdseed and were holding and feeding the parrots and lorikeets. We were more interested in moving on to the primates.

We fed the chimpanzees. Well, they were labeled “chimpanzee”, but I am pretty sure that was wrong. Too large. And all black. No bulbous pink mouths or protruding pink ears. I think they were some type of gorilla. Regardless, the guy selling the fruit had to call them over because they were both busy taking naps. I don’t even want to mention what the male gorilla did when he came to the edge of the water. The female, however, had a quick dip and then kept putting her hand out to have us throw her fruit. She was a pretty good catch.

He also called the one orangutan out of her shady napping area. Her name was Nancy. I felt sorry for her. Primates are social and usually live in families. This large enclosure was just for Nancy. He said she was about 50 years old. Poor old maid. At least the gorillas had each other. They seemed like an old married couple.

By this time, we only had five minutes left with the golf cart, so we didn’t get to go in the monkey house. Patrica really wanted to see the cassowaries that they had listed on the map. Alas, we could not find them. Pretty sure they were part of the missing Australia exhibit.

We dropped the cart off, got a cold drink and headed for the water park. It was actually really nice. They watched your shoes for you outside and you could rent swim suits and swim caps and sandals. But you couldn’t take your own sandals in… I didn’t have my swim suit and I didn’t rent one either. I followed Patricia out to the pool, but was waylaid again by some teenage Thai boys who all wanted their picture taken with me. I really should have been charging.

They had a very large kiddie play pool with fountains and play equipment and that sort. There was a large sort of lazy river pool that connected to the water slide pool. Two of the four water slides were functional. I kind of wished I had rented sandals because the walkways were all very hot and I kept scurrying to the next area with steps down to the water or a shore where I could walk in. Patricia finished her dip and we went to try and figure out how to get home.

When we left Songkhla, Pop had said that we could get a bus from the zoo back to town. No one there knew what we were talking about. We called Pop and he put the woman on the phone who had lent us her husband earlier. She wanted another 200 baht to pick us up. Highway robbery. We could get a taxi service to take us from Songkhla to Hat Yai for 300. And that’s a 40 minute drive. This was 15. Max. A couple of people who worked at the zoo offered to take us on scooters back down the mountain so we could catch a tuk-tuk. Basically, if you wait a minute in Thailand, you can find someone who will help you out. The tuk-tuk driver said he knew where we needed to go (they always say they do). We headed back to town and Patricia suggested that we just have him take us to Liwiwat so we could get pizza. He seemed confused by this, which was odd since Liwiwat is very well known. At this time, we were at the intersection where the Toyota dealership was. I pointed to our road and he took us to Greenview. Where we caught scooter taxis to Liwiwat. They originally told us 20 each. Then when they dropped us off, they seemed to be asking for more. However, they were still saying 20. Which we had already handed each of them.

We shared a pizza and talked about housing plans. We were both of the mind that we wanted to stay in Songkhla if ABA would agree to a transportation allowance, which was more than fair. They had offered to raise our housing allowance to live in Hat Yai (not enough to cover what we had found available). But since we couldn’t find anything for a decent price there, why not just pay to get us to and from school instead?

After lunch, we headed down and Patricia purchased a 4gb thumb drive for 199 baht ($6.28) and I found a power strip with a really long cord. I needed an extension cord, but they seem to be nonexistent here. And the power strip was only 160 baht. There are only two outlets in my room and they are as far from my bed as they can possibly be without being in the bathroom… And I like to use my computer in bed.

For some reason, tuk-tuks seemed to be in short supply. We had to walk a ways before we found scooter taxis. Who wanted to charge us 50 each. Nope. A tuk-tuk was 20 per. Found one. And he really DID know where Greenview Mansion was. Didn’t have to ask for directions even once. Bless him. He did stop on the way to buy a snack, though.

Once we got back, picked up my laundry (100 baht) and we parted ways for the rest of the day. Neither of us was hungry later. I was mostly thirsty and really wanted to drink the Pepsi that I bought. But it was in a bottle. That was NOT a screw top. And I had no bottle opener. And I was too lazy to go back downstairs and have them open it for me. So I went without. The end.