Category: Thai Society/Culture

Taken at the English Camp we went on a couple weeks back.
(Nodules will be explained in a later post)

I saw this shot when arriving to my building at school this morning. I passed by first, then turned around my car, got my camera out, then turned around again to make a second pass. It was much too far to get a clean shot drive-by style out the passenger-side window, but channel mixing in Photoshop is the impatient photographer’s lopsided wooden crutch – left in the attic until needed, and then suddenly irreplaceable.

A few months ago I wrote about the dragonfruit trees in our backyard secretly blooming at midnight. Well, these are pitaya by day:

As it turns out, the universal truth about fruit (“best when fresh picked and grown organically with water buffalo cakes as fertilizer”) is especially true for pitaya: I can honestly say that the dragonfruit we grew tasted better than any I have tried until now, and I have tried many from roadside stands and markets alike. In fact, growing them naturally raised the overall flavor from “disappointing considering how exotic it looks / slightly and boringly sweet” to “tasty, almost delicious.” Overall, a wonderful result: I love seeing stacks and stacks of dragonfruit being sold at the roadside fruit stalls, but I’ll never buy one again.
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Bonus tropical fruit shot:

After looking over that last post, I just couldn’t help myself:


(click on photo to open large version in pop-up)

Since we live next to a forest, we are used to seeing both wild and domesticated animals just over the wall as well as in and around the house. Out of all of the creatures that we share space with, the ones that really pose problems are: Ants, termites, mosquitoes, and the tokay lizards. The insects are a problem for obvious reasons, and the tokays (two of which I recently caught off guard long enough to photo) are actually kind of beneficial because they eat cockroaches, beetles, and other large insects, but their mating calls are loud and go on all night for about half of the year.
For this reason, we seized the opportunity to capture and relocate one of these bad boys the other day, when we found him crawling on the first-story wall instead of his usual hangout under the eaves of the roof. We called a couple workmen in the neighborhood to come catch him, and they cobbled together a crude snare with a broomhandle and some string… which completely failed when it came to the task of actually catching the beast. The tokay laughed at their feeble attempts to ensnare it and ran back to the eaves.
Tokay: 1
Justin: 0
The next morning, however, it was time for a rematch. The same lizard decided to take a walk on the wall separating our yard from the adjacent forest, so I decided it was time to break out the heavy weapons: A foolproof snare made from heavy fishing monofilament and the top half of my trusty graphite-core jigging rod. Thus armed, I quietly stalked my prey and made no quick movements, sure of my impending success… The lizard backed away from the transparent snare, snorted at my feeble attempts to fool him with technology, and started running back toward the house (I noticed that tokays cannot run on horizontal surfaces as quickly as you would expect – they have kind of a clumsy, inefficient gait that works real well on walls, though). I just barely managed to cut him off and scare him back onto the wall.
Tokay: 2
Justin: 0
At this point, I realized that what was needed was a more direct approach, that is, someone needed to grab this bad boy behind the neck like a snake, and end this pussyfooting around crap. I also realized that I was way too much of a bi-otch to do it myself, so I did what any great leader does in a time of crisis: I delegated. There was a workman (a different one from the previous night) sweeping the street on our block, so we hailed him over to have a crack at it. The result of my getting the hell out of the way and letting a real man do the dirty work:


So the new tally would be:
Tokay: 2
Justin: I WINS, BITCH!
I took photos of the prisoner, prodded various parts of his anatomy (the foot pads of this lizard are absolutely amazing – they look like something out of a Giger sketch and have unbelievable sticking power – it gripped onto my fingernail and for a second, I thought I might lose it), and had him deported far away from my house. We paid the man for his services with 20 baht and a box of dried fish snacks. It was a very happy experience for everybody, except perhaps for the lizard. I have a feeling he won’t have a hard time finding enough insects to eat anywhere in this country, though. Unless the man took him home to eat, that is.
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Immediately after the tokay capture, Nam let out a scream from the back of the house where the sink for washing dishes is, because this little guy scared her:

And a few hours later, she spotted this huge (about as big as my hand spread out) butterfly on our window:

It was truly wild animal day; I look forward to it again next year, at the new house!
RE: The title of this post – Akrachat is the name of our neighborhood

Meet thine foe:

These things just look evil, and Nam insisted I dispatch it when we found it in her university’s parking lot. “Dangerous for students walking around,” she said. I tried to kill it with a rock, but it wouldn’t die, so I pried a brick loose from a nearby footpath and ground its head into the hard-packed dirt. The whole time, my skin was crawling.
This was probably the biggest one I’ve ever seen (around 8 inches long, and fatter than your finger), much bigger than the ones in Japan.
Fucking nasty creatures.