AMAZING THAILAND’S AMAZING ANIMALS

Monkeys and snakes and elephants and bears, oh my!

By Dan McCrory

My third trip to Thailand was the most memorable because I’m an animal lover.

We started our trip by flying into Bangkok, arriving at four in the morning. Our friend and guide Sombat picked us up at the airport and drove us an hour and a half south to the beachside city of Pattaya, The sun wasn’t up yet when we hit town and our hotel wasn’t ready for us. We found an open restaurant and gorged ourselves on local delicacies while  the restaurant’s five waiters swiftly attended to our needs. After breakfast/dinner we drove around the beach area till daybreak. Remarkably, we stumbled upon a Starbucks. The coffee was the same, but the tops of the muffins had been sheered off to accommodate the locals’ preference.

With the morning mists still swirling around us, we stumbled onto a live snake show. We sat there bleary-eyed, watching grown men take unnecessary risks as they teased cobras and other venomous snakes. (The reptiles obviously didn’t like all the attention; they hissed and swayed threateningly.)  After the show we discovered their mini-zoo. We patted and photographed a baby Asian elephant, standing chest-high in all its wiry, wrinkled glory, and cooed at a six foot declawed sun bear, or Mee-Mah, meaning “dog-bear” that barely resembles its American cousins and does look like a large dog.

One night was enough of Pattaya; the local wildlife was, for the most part, of the human variety. We drove back to Bangkok and flew out of Suvarnabhumi Airport north to Chiang Mai.

For $20 US per person, we booked a trip to a local elephant sanctuary. We gazed up in awe, overwhelmed by their sheer size. They lifted tourists with their trunks and patiently put up with us as we patted and rubbed their wiry hides. We watched while their handlers bathed them in the river that flowed next to the compound. Then, two by two, we “boarded” our elephants, forded the river, and climbed into the jungle on a narrow path into the hills then back down and across the river. On their backs we swayed in the sedan chair as the elephant lumbered along. Looking over the side of the massive pachyderm it looked like a 10 foot drop to the path. If the elephant tumbled off the path, and managed to NOT roll over on us and squash us like bugs, the drop off the steep hillside alone would probably finish us. I tried to relax and enjoy the view. After the hike, we were treated to a demonstration of their other skills: they tossed around utility poles to illustrate their original use in heavy lifting, painted pictures, played soccer, and danced. (We have since discovered that not all elephant camps are the same. This most holy of animals in Thailand is often mistreated.)

Two days later, we flew back to Bangkok and drove just north of the city to the town of Lopburi, home to seemingly thousands of long-tailed macaque monkeys. All the windows of shops and houses in Lopburi are barred to keep the little thieves out. They outnumber the local citizenry and are just barely tolerated because they draw tourists.

We bought a bag of peanuts and headed to the ruins of a Buddhist temple across the street where, we were told, the monkeys congregated. We needn’t have bothered. Within minutes we were surrounded. We looked up and they were everywhere: walking down the street, hanging from the power lines, standing in front of us, staring wistfully at my girlfriend’s bag of peanuts.

One monkey swiped at the bag. It split open and suddenly a sea of monkeys swarmed over and around our feet until every peanut was gone. We bought more.

On the drive up, our friend Carla told us about a childhood incident that had scarred her for life and generated a fear of monkeys: One of her friends had owned a little spider monkey and Spanky had been either attracted to, or appalled by, Carla’s red hair. He had hopped onto her back and pulled it out in little fistfuls.

We laughed about it as we entered the temple ruins with monkeys gazing down at us from every vantage point. There was absolutely no way history was going to repeat that episode! We happily doled out peanuts to grateful primates until one of them spotted Carla’s red hair and jumped onto her shoulders. We fought him off pretty quickly, before she was fully traumatized. In fact, she laughed off the episode. I really think it cured her aversion to monkeys. Of course, I’m the one who was bitten by an orangutan, but that’s a story from another trip.

SCOTLAND'S YARDS

Even in so-called English-speaking countries, the language can be an impediment. In the village of Dailly, Scotland, we met Mary, the proprietor of the town’s only restaurant, Tillie’s.  It was a sunny March day, but a piercing wind went right through the “warm” clothes we brought with us from southern California.

“What do you have that will warm our bones?” I inquired.

“Ever had a Rusty Nail?” she asked several times until we could make sense of her rural brogue.

For those who don’t like Scotch, it’s a palatable way to imbibe it. A dram of Scotch and a wee bit of Drambuie chase away the midday chill quite nicely.

We wandered into one of the village’s two pubs and bought everybody, all four people, a round of drinks. There was nary a dartboard in sight, but a couple of the lads were playing dominoes and invited us to play. John, a deaf-mute who read lips because he never received training in sign language, was the greatest communicator. After we won two out of three games, they finally admitted with a sheepish smile (more on that later!) that they were actually the local dominoes champions.

Back at Tillie’s, Mary told us that her husband Neil was an award-winning trainer of the border collies everyone in this region uses for rounding up their sheep.

“Are ye interested in watching Neil herd sheep?” At least, I think that was what she asked us.

“Sure!” we said in unison.

The next morning with the same confounded bone-chilling wind blowing through us, we debated breaking with social traditions to take a nip of alcohol hours and hours before cocktail time. Instead, we peppered Neil with questions as he directed a sheep stampede around me and put his dogs through their paces with a series of whistles and shouted incomprehensible commands. We listened to the recording later and between his brogue and the wind, we didn’t get a lot of information, but we knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  We did learn the best way to talk with Scots was to throw in the occasional exuberant, “Aye!”

Would we visit the rolling hills and forests of verdant green again? Aye!