BID no. 38 - See These Animals in the Wild...

e) Elephant

l) Monkey

- check!

During my visit to Thailand in January (2011) I also visited the National Park of Khao Sok, which is one of several national parks in Thailand.(http://www.khaosok.com/)

The following text is extracted from the link above, in order to give you a hint of the national park and the extent of it:

The National Park consists of:

The rainforest in this region is some of the oldest in the world, since over the last 160 million years Thailand has remained in a similar equatorial position. The climate in the area has been relatively unaffected by ice ages, since the landmass is relatively small and has seas on both sides. Even whilst other places on the planet were suffering droughts, the Khao Sok region still received enough rainfall to sustain the forests.

Species diversity is high in Khao Sok, since during the last ice age sea levels fell to such an extent that there was a land bridge between Malaysia, Borneo and some of the Indonesian islands. This opened up new migration routes to land based organisms.

The rainforest in Khao Sok has features of both tropical evergreen forest and tropical rainforest. There are approximately 200 different floral species per squarekilometer.

Khao Sok is also famous for its limestone or ‘karst ‘mountains. In most of the region, ground level is about 200m above sea level, with the average mountain heights around 400m. The tallest peak in the National Park is 960m in height.

Wildlife (recorded species)

During my visit to Khao Sok I managed to see at least

- 1 wild elephant (not including the captured elephants we rode)

- 1 gibbon ass :) (Thank you Jessica for letting me know this one counted!)

- 2 gigantic spiders of the same uknown kind (at least the size of my hand).

- 1 female tree frog

- 1 small kind of lizzard

- a bunch of different beautiful butterflies in wonderful colours.

Do you think I got the animals on camera...?

Only the tree frog and one blue butterfly to show for you...

BID no. 36 - Visit every continent

a) Asia

- check!

Between the 16:th-23:rd of janary 2011, I spent a wonderful week in Thailand. Our hotel was situated in the province of Phuket just outside Patong, on Tri Trang Beach and had all the luxuries we could ever want for our vacation. Most of all I wished for sun and solitude, and got plenty of it!

At the wonderful beach close to our hotel we spend many hours just relaxing and reading our books, when not taking a bath in the perfectly tempered waters of Andaman Sea.

We also got our fair share of shopping while visiting Thailand. Patong offered an enormous smorgasbord of "all you can want, as cheap as you can knock it down". To go with all the shopping, there was also motors-bikes and tuk-tuks everywhere, and all the noice this mess of different sounds made! It sure felt good to return to the hotel at night.

I learned that the thai-people are very friendly and very caring, but also that the business of tourism and the wish to reach the "american standard" (this standard you can read about just about anywhere in any kind of commercial or ad) is about to create a problem for the people, as new way of life is so contradictory to their main religion (95% buddhism in Thailand) that states that "the less you have, the richer you are". This contradiction is starting to show already in behaviour created by the tip for service, which is soon to be mandatory if you are to get any service at all in the end.

Buddhism for me is the only way to maintain this world, so it made me a bit anxious about the future. I fear that (at least the south of) Thailand is already over exploited and due to be left by the tourists (their greatest soruce of income) if this carousel isn't to be stopped and reversed.

The wonderful hotel Merlin Beach Resort and its beautiful surroundings