7.7.12

Ellie did end up coming to Songkhla on Saturday. Yay! First stop, the Songkhla Aquarium. It is located on the north end of the peninsula, fairly isolated from anything else. Now, it’s not really something to write home about (even though that’s precisely what I’m doing), but for 200 baht ($6-ish), you can hardly go wrong. There is also a go-kart track, for those of you who go to the aquarium to ride go-karts. Mostly, the exhibits seemed to be freshwater fish. Lots of groupers and catfish and that sort of thing. They had one standalone tank containing two different couples of two different types of clown fish. The smaller, “Nemo” clown fish were trying to defend their anemone from the other two. As Ellie said, “It doesn’t seem like a fair fight.”

Another standalone had two frog fish. Those are really strange looking. Pretty small, sand-colored and they look spiny and they just sit on the bottom of the tank. But their fins really do make them look like frogs. The stone fish was scary. I was looking right at him and knew what I was looking at and still couldn’t register that it was really a fish. Won’t be stepping on any rocks in the ocean with bare feet…

Sea turtles! They had a whole tank full of adolescent sea turtles. They have got to be one of my favorite ocean creatures. Their faces are so calm and sweet and they just glide through the water. I could have watched them all day.

We were ushered in to the area with the large tank that houses the sharks and the one ray and some very large sea turtles and a variety of angel fish and groupers larger than a 3-year old child. The feeding show was about to start… The theme song to Mission Impossible started up and a scuba diver rode in on a shark. Yes, a shark. Continue reading →