Safari World, December 2009

Little Nio loves animals. As a treat, I decided to take him out to see some real live animals, rather than just the ones he can see on the Animal Planet channel. We drove out to visit the animals at "Safari World". Living life vicariously via the television isn't the same thing at all as actually living it.



Don't ask me for directions, I'm one of those poor folks who is "navigationally impaired". All I know is that it's about an hour away to the north of Bangkok in the province of Minburi. I took care of the driving, but the route was all plotted out by GPS. Above is a satellite image of the park (courtesy of GoogleEarth), but the cloud cover isn't showing very much.



Here's Little Nio wearing his "tiger" t-shirt all strapped in and ready to enter the park. Admission into the park (without any of the shows) for children is free, and adults only pay something like a hundred baht, or less. We didn't do any shows, which could last the entire day, so we managed to drive the course of the park in a little less than two hours. Tickets for the various shows are more expensive and they go up to 450 THB for children and 875 THB for adults.





First looks at zebras for Little Nio.



He looks a little bit upset that there's a cement mixer in the park with the zebras, but apparently that truck is mixing feed for the animals.



Some really ugly looking ostriches. Some of them had large patches of exposed skin missing their feathers. They're not exactly attractive birds to begin with, so without the feathers they are even less so. Let's not even talk about the smell.



Little Nio points to a camel. The camel just stares back at us. I'm not sure if camels can point back with their toes.





There is a large water reservoir in the middle of the first part of the park and in it there are several "islands" that the birds use for nesting. You can see a couple of giraffes in the background.



Safari World boasts having one of the largest giraffe herds outside of Africa.



They also have an impressive number of rhinos mixing in with the zebras.



Little Nio pointing to one of the deer.



Here he is pointing to a whole bunch of them. I think these are actually a kind of antelope, the Oryx.



Impressive horned beasties of some sort. I forget what they are called, but as soon as I figure that out I'll jump back in and edit this post. These beastie beauties were near the end of the park section where you are allowed to roll your windows down. Every where else after that section needed to have the windows rolled up all the way and the doors locked securely.



Driving through a series of gates arranged as a sluice passage, we enter into the more dangerous part of the park. We pass a pride of lions lounging in the shade.



Not much further along we pass a whole group of tigers underneath a makeshift shelter out of the sun.



Here's a more active group of tigers. I started to wonder how the park staff managed to separate the lions from the tigers, when clearly one could easily drive from one part where we saw the lions to the next one where most of the tigers were sitting around.



It appears that the park doesn't bother to separate the lions from the tigers. Here they are all sitting around together. There are a few birds hopping around between the big cats just to make the menagerie even more interesting.



Towards the end of the park, Little Nio starts pointing to one of his most favorite animals - the bears.



We had a really good time together that morning. After Safari World we drove back to the nice air conditioned comfort of a modern mall where we had lunch before going home.

Christmas Party, December 2009

Little Nio joined the Christmas Party at his daycare center. Unfortunately, because it was held in the middle of the day, I wasn't able to attend so I lent one of our digital cameras to the staff at the center so that they could take some photos for us.



Here's Little Nio posing in front of the pin-up Christmas Tree. I suppose having an actual tree would be too much of a hassle, specially with a few dozen little children running around. A real tree would take up too much room, be a real obstruction and who knows what kinds of allergic the kids might have to it. And that's one of the things I appreciate most about Fullakids, there's a lot of foresight given to decisions made for the children. Always very safe and sensible.







Looks like storytelling or singing time, with Little Nio sitting right beside his teacher, Miss Radeane, who owns and runs Fullakids. She has three of her own children, but she enjoys taking care and teaching the kids.



Here's Little Nio posing with his little hat that has his name "Antonio" written on the hem in nice big silver letters.



Looks like they're ready to have some activities here.





Dancing time! Little Nio has picked out a friend to be his partner. The daycare has about thirty to forty children from ages 2 to 5 years old, but the average age seems to be 3. The children are from all over the world, with about half of the kids Asian and only a handful of kids from Thailand. This is excellent exposure for Little Nio at a really early age. Reminds me of that song from "South Pacific"... "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught".



A very thoughtful little Christmas gift from Fullakids!