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.

Back to the Zoo, September 2008

My wife Kanittha's mother, my mother-in-law Khun Tiab, came to visit and stay with us for a few weeks bringing along Little Nio's cousin, Pi Toon. We took the opportunity to spend a family day at Dusit Zoo.



From left-to-right: my mother-in-law, Khun Tiab; Little Nio and his Mommy; his cousin, Pi Toon and of course my sister-in-law Pa Khut. Little Nio is complaining that his Daddy is not in the photograph and gets very vocal about it.



Here's another group photograph, but this time with Daddy carrying Little Nio. Notice how he's not too upset about Mommy being the one who is taking the photograph. Perhaps he thinks that Mommy takes better photographs and knows his good side.





Just like on "Animal Planet", but with much better reception — and no commercial breaks. We all get treated to a real slice of nature as we watched a monitor lizard catch a live fish, and then successfully evade as another competing monitor lizard attempted to steal his catch.



Posing with a stuffed crocodile, Little Nio cautiously attempts to pet the snout.



Here's Little Nio with his Daddy, who is pointing out and meticulously trying to explain all about the ostriches.



And here's Little Nio explaining to his Daddy that he shouldn't talk too much about everything and simply enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the day.



A shrill shriek from Little Nio brings this troop of meerkats to attention.



Here's Little Nio sharing a moment with his Mommy, while posing in front of some very cool elephant statues.



Little Nio sandwiched between his Mommy and Daddy with this very noisy fountain right behind. The noise is making him restless and annoyed. We had a great time that day, but less than an hour after these photographs were taken there was a tremendous downpour of rain and we had to cut short our visit to the zoo. We're not too upset about this because we know that we will all have another opportunity to visit again soon.

Dusit Zoo, July 2008

It was a beautiful day... too good to pass up, so we went to visit Dusit Zoo.



I visited this zoo once before, almost a decade ago, and while it isn't a top notch facility it's come a long way in improving.



Here's our son, Antonio, with my wife, Kanittha, all dressed up and ready to go to the zoo.







We started Little Nio looking at some of the birds... and while he showed some interest it didn't really get him all excited.



Then we went to look at some zebras...



Some deer...



And some kangaroos. Interesting stuff, but it just didn't really make Little Nio excited.



It was only when we got Little Nio to the elephants that we got a big smile.



By the time we got him to the lion cages, Little Nio was really excited.



But the really highpoint of our zoo visit was the big tiger. Little Nio could not stop smiling and pointing at the big cat, and calling it, "Sam".





I guess all the excitement took a lot of energy out of Little Nio. His batteries ran out by the time we hit the zoo tram and he was fast asleep in his Daddy's arms. After an hour power nap, he was up and about again.