DAY 18 - NONG NOOCH TROPICAL GARDEN

Chai picked us up around 8:30 a.m. and took us out to see the tropical gardens which are billed to have the world's largest collection of palms and the most variety of orchids.  Pretty impressive - on the scale of Butchart Gardens in Victoria, but a little more "kitschy" with a lot of cartoon type animal figures throughout and not so many flowers...  Still, it was quite beautiful.

Baby tiger - they also had a full grown one
but it looked like it may have been drugged?

Near the entrance, they had some tigers, a gibbon (monkey) and some tropical birds (all chained up) that you could pay to have a photo taken with....  We took a pass.

Corinne & Chai (our driver)

 Chai told us this was only the second time he had ever seen elephants mating and, because it was so rare to see, it was considered very lucky...  The sound that female was making didn't sound like she thought it was her lucky day!  The noise she made was deafening!  Notice how Danny managed to keep the photo at a very discreet angle with the post?  There was a Russian woman darting around, back & forth desperately trying to get a photo with all the goods!


It was actually quite fun feeding the elephants...  We bought bunches of small bananas (plantains?) that they were very happy to take off our hands.  If you gave them the whole bunch, they'd stick the whole thing in their mouths - guess it wasn't much of a mouthful for them :)

Also took in the Thai cultural show and elephant show (elephants are the national symbol of Thailand).   They've trained the elephants to do different tricks, including painting, which I found pretty amazing.  Obviousy, they've taught the elephants which strokes to make, and which colours to use - they end up with beautiful paintings, which they've done on t-shirts which are then sold (of course).  

During the elephant show, there were young boys (maybe 7 or 8?) going up and down selling bunches of bananas for the people to feed to the elephants.  Chai told us that these boys are usually the sons of the elephant trainers.  They don't go to school.  Families come from Cambodia (where, apparently, their lives are much worse); fathers may be elephant trainers, young sons sell the bananas, wives and daughters work in the concessions or tending the gardens.  They live on the grounds.  The gardens provide work for approx. 1200 people.

We took an open tour bus around the grounds - simply too hot, even in the morning, to spend the 4 hours it would take to walk it.

French garden

Cacti  

"Stone Henge"

Later, we asked Chai to take us to the Pinnacle Revolving Restaurant.  This is the tower that we can see from our condo balcony so we were quite curious to see the view from up there.  Food was mediocre but the view was fabulous.  They have zip lines as well as these gondolas going from the top of the tower (55 floors) down to the ground.  No, none of us cared to try it out!

These "foot spas" are all over the place...
Stick your feet in & these little fish
nibble the dead skin off your feet

Last stop of the day was the Golden Buddha on Pratamnak Hill in Pattatya.