Chasing Aquariums: Our Day in Phuket

Life is continuing on here as usual (teaching English and typing up annual reports), so we thought we'd write about a previous adventure. The week of Songkran, Kendra, Bailey, and I made the short trip down to Phuket for a day of adventure. The first stop? The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project.

The GRP is an initiative maintained by the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand. They receive, maintain, and rehabilitate Gibbons, in addition to slowly reintroducing them back into the wild when possible. I was as giddy as a schoolboy as we drove to the National Park wherein the whooping noises made by the territorial Gibbons could be heard from far away. After paying a pointless entry fee to the park, we made it to the GRP site.

Gibby, shown here in a thoughtful pose, was especially rambunctious 

After walking up some stone steps, visitors can see the phenomenally acrobatic gibbons swinging and leaping about their chain-link enclosures. A small shop with gibbon related items sits to one side, while the path among the enclosures leads off to the other. You first come across a long billboard with photos and back stories of the GRP's gibbons. Many of them have quite sad tales as to how they came to be at the center. A common practice is to take gibbons from the wild, often the babies from slain mothers, and maintain them for the purpose of taking pictures with tourists. One such gibbon was playing with the 'owner's ' daughter, when it mildly bit her. The man beat the gibbon so furiously that she had to have a hand and foot amputated (a terrible blow for such an active animal), and was given up to a collector. The ignorant collector, however, just threw her in with a cage of other gibbons, and since the others were quite territorial, she was attacked and lost all but two fingers on the remaining hand. She was apparently in the most pitiful condition of any they'd received, but she's paired up with a male right now and was able to swing about her cage with her "good" hand.

The separation between the path and the enclosures, combined with a request to not use a flash, made it difficult to take photos but we got excellent video of the little guys pulling of moves that even an under-aged Chinese Olympic gymnast couldn't touch. After speaking with two volunteers in the shop, we headed up a 300m path into the park to check out a waterfall.

We made it up the picturesque jungle hike to reach a shallow creek with a sandy bottom fed by a 50 foot waterfall (though it was reduced to a near trickle). Locals swam about and even dove off the cliffs into the narrow pool of water, but Bailey and I were content to simply swim at the base and climb up beneath the falls. Kendra and I then had an impromptu photo shoot.

Refreshed from our time at the waterfall, we made the hike back down and set about driving into Phuket Town. On the way, we spotted a local market and were able to grab a simple chicken and rice dish for lunch, adding some delicious sauces to the mix to spice things up a bit.

One of the vendors at the market

We then undertook one of the greatest quests since Lewis and Clark explored the American West- we tried to find the Phuket Aquarium.

That damn Aquarium. It was so far south of Phuket Town it might as well have been the Malaysian Aquarium. Knowing they closed at 4:30, we raced through the city, following directions locals gave us as the website directions are a very descriptive, "go South." As the clock ticked closer to 4:30, the excitement reached fever pitch as we grew nearer to our elusive goal. Finally we reached it!

But they were closed. After such great lengths to find it, the moment was highly anti-climactic. We immediately pronounced it 'lame, anyway' and, upon driving back to Phuket, decided to journey off the beaten path to a nearby beach. This would be a wonderfully relaxing stop, as the shallow water of the sandy beach cooled our hatred of the Aquarium, while two retrievers owned by a beach-side bar owner taught us how to love again.

Hungry tummies soon led us to seek fulfillment and an evening's entertainment at Phuket's mall, where cheap eating and good times are easy to come by. It was a wonderful day experiencing some of what Phuket has to offer (other than speedo-clad tourists), and we certainly rested well that night.