Last weekend, a student called up and said he wanted to show me a local sight. “Well,” I figured, “whatever it is, it should beat the hell out of tipping water buffaloes on yet another Saturday afternoon.”
So the wife and I got in the car and picked up said student and his girl at her apartment. We drove about ten kilometers on back country roads with potholes nearly the size of our current ride, my sister-in-law’s cute blue Opel Corsa.
After nearly running over several wild chickens and sleeping dog, we arrived at our destination:
The entrance to Wan Macha Fish Sanctuary.
A fish sanctuary?
I’m just guessing it would suck to get stuck in a hungry catfish’s mouth.
Yes.
Don’t let the perspective fool you, some of these guys are longer than my leg.
After feeding the lake monsters, we walked around a bit to view the rest of the sanctuary. As it turns out, while they are obviously doing a great job of caring for the fish, the whole thing is ruined because they are keeping other animals under horrible conditions. I choose not to show most of them here (in fact, I chose not to not even take too many photos because it made me sick), but there were crocodiles, monitor lizards, several bird species, rabbits, guinea pigs, and a pair of foxes all kept in small cinder block cells like in some medieval zoo. Also, they were keeping adult monkeys isolated in one square meter cages made of chain link fence, which were blessedly cooler than the cinder block cells, but way too cramped, and the monkeys just looked like they wanted to die… They wouldn’t even eat the fruit we tried to give them. The only comparable lack of compassion and common sense I’ve ever seen was in a Kyushu zoo around ten years ago, when I saw a sick lion sitting in its own feces in 100 degree weather…
Anyway, more photos:
Now that’s a lawn mower.
I believe I’ve found Christmas Dinner!
A beautiful place, ruined by the ignorance of its keepers.
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For more catfish porn, see my Flickr set here.
Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
speechless.
*sigh*
That was a most excellent lawn mower. Who/What do you use to keep your yard trimmed? Local cattle? And that mighty peacock. Reminds me of many an afternoon spent inside a classroom pretending to learn LATIN in a Japanese University. Sut ne templar? (Sorry, you have to be me or Justin to get that…)
Um, douros or something… What was the name of that teacher again? He loved us.
I just remembered about the peacocks crying outside the window. Did you ever actually see them? If not, you’ll just have to take my word on it – that’s what a peacock sounds like.
The retarded work crews “improving” the water main for this entire side of town have so completely fucked up the job that our water has been cut off 90% of the time for the past three weeks. Ain’t no need to trim dying grass. If I had to, though, I’d go the cow route.
I’m totally digging on this stuff about Thailand. Interesting!