My Recent Trip to Thailand

Well as a number of Year 4 Bio students will know, I'd been missing in action at Thailand to do some loris work and attend a workshop.

We(as in a Thai MSc, Dr. Anna Nekaris and I) went to Khao Ang Runai Wildlife Sanctuary. Its got a field station with some electricity, but guano falls from the ceiling everyday. On our 1st night walk, we recorded 6 lorises. Super cool. My first wild loris sightings. Dr Nekaris kept gushing about the high incidence rate and flat ground and how lucky Manoon (the Thai MSc student) was. And I was thinking how BTNR is the exact opposite. It must seem like a quite shithole if Manoon ever visits.

Khao Ang Runai is a really good place to do wildlife research mainly because of the good terrain and "low leech detection rates", as Dr. Nekaris put it. I still got 2 leech bites though. Besides this research, the other project going on there is one with pileated gibbons (Hylobates pileatus). The sanctuary is known for wild elephants and leopards as well.

Well I would love to post pictures.. BUT I haven't scanned my films and a lot of them are in Dr. Nekaris and Manoon's digital and video cameras. It'll be abt 2 months before I post them I guess. And the dumb airport customs at Survanabhumi Airport insisted I put my camera through an x-ray scanner. I hope it doesnt kill the film inside.

After the field trip, I attended the workshop. Actually, the workshop is only one half of the day. The second half was in fact a meeting between Thai and Cambodian government officials with regards to smuggling of lorises across their borders, and the constant misidentification of loris species. Dr. Nekaris was the technical advisor and I joined her. =p

Basically, for me the whole thing was a wonderful learning experience, but with regards to solving the problems, it was a complete waste of time. The Cambodians refuse to accept that they had a problem (they kept asking for evidence, when it was right there in their markets). While the Thais conceded that there was a problem, they were just sitting on their hands on not committing anything. The Cambodians asked for a bilateral agreement (which is rubbish because it will take years to hammer something out) and the Thais said they had no $$ to train sniffer dogs to sniff out smuggled lorises. No $?! Hah. What nonsense. Sitting right outside the meeting room was about 100 spanking new 4WD trucks sitting in the rain, bought with budget SURPLUS, which they had to spend before the end of the fiscal year. The TRAFFIC representative was talking about training border police and giving training and evaluation support. That was the only thing that they did not have any excuse to not do. Then it kind of hit me that it would take a long time to develop the training packages and they might probably never get done. I thought we were getting nowhere, so I grabbed the microphone and just let rip. Well I didn't exactly tell them to their faces what I thought of them, but I hinted that I think they were trying to not do anything, and I suggested that they use the loris experts currently doing research in the country. I think I shocked Dr. Nekaris a bit. But I think they needed a good kick up their backsides.

Oh and another thing, I think the "Singapore" and "NUS" tag gives you a level of prestige in Thailand somehow.

I think I would like to go back again. Loris taxonomy is in a mess, and maybe once
Nycticebus coucang has its mess sorted out, I'll head to Thailand to help Manoon out with the N.bengalensis mess.