Safari World Adventure

With all the time off Rick has (from December 23rd all the way until January 7th) we are trying to do some neat things with the kids. So far, we’ve only gone to Safari World (a very cool animal park…more to come on that!) but we also hope to visit some other places like “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” in Konchaburi, about an hour and a half from here, some local parks and temples (at one of the temples you can feed the turtles!), and then from January 4th to 7th, we’re heading down to Koh Chang, one of the islands right off the coast, for a little beach vacation!

Yesterday we headed out to Safari World – it was cool! It’s a huge animal park that has a marine area (we didn’t make it there yesterday but we’ll go back), an animal area, and then a drive through open zoo. The drive through zoo part took about a half hour or forty minutes and the animals were right there – you could have reached out and touched most of them! There were camels, giraffes, rhinos, tigers, lions, and bears (oh my!), lots of birds, storks, pelicans, deer, peacocks, etc. In the dangerous animal areas they tell you to roll up your windows and keep your doors shut – you don’t want a tiger making a snack of you! We even saw one tiger stalking another one, and then attacking it (in play!) The animals are all in pretty much their natural environment and judging by the frisky behavior of the camels and the bears, they felt pretty natural! (I’ve never seen THAT done before! We told the kids those animals sure were doing a lot of hugging!)

After the drive through part, you go into the actual park. There are a ton of shows to see the different animals. We only made it to one of the shows, though (they were spread out over a few hours each.) It was very funny (mostly only to us…wasn’t meant to be that funny!) – we saw the Wild West Stunt show that was set up, yes, in Tombstone, Arizona! Better yet, it was cowboys and Indians doing their stuff, all in Thai! We also saw a Thai lady statue that was spraying water to cool you off as you walked by….but the water was coming from the most unusual places! (Check out the picture, below! You might have to click on it to make it bigger so that you can really see it!) Finally, Tim and Caroline were busy monkeying around, making some new, uh, friends! Rick says those pictures remind him of his frat days back at U of A…those orangutans could have been a couple of his Kappa Sig brothers after a few too many drinks, hitting on the ladies! ;)