Our car arrived (with baby seat) this morning, so we decided to revisit the previous day’s plan. Heading off to the northwest of the island, we visited a gibbon rehabilitation centre where they try to save injured and orphaned gibbons for reintegration into the wild.
Just the previous day, we had paid a street vendor 100 baht to pat and spend time with a baby gibbon in the street. I won’t ever do this again having spent time talking to the staff at the rehab centre. The only way that the poachers can get the baby gibbons is by shooting the mother in the wild and in the tree where they spend 95% of their life. Only one in nine baby gibbons survive the subsequent fall from the tree. Of those that survive, they are used for display/income purposes for abut a year and then simply discarded because they have lost their cuteness. By this time, they have lost all skills to fend for themselves and usually simply starve. Not a pretty picture, and at least the Thai government has made possession of these amazingly trusting animals an offence. The calls of the adult gibbons are quit eerie, and it makes a wonderful sound when a heap of them get going at about the same time.
Enroute home, we deviated via Surin and Kamala on the west coast. Dinner at the Andamon resort in Surin proved to be an unexpected highlight. The kids played in the shallows of the beach, and we enjoyed a lovely meal in tropical conditions as the sun set over the water. Our table was just a metre or so from the sand of the beach, and we all enjoyed cocktails (Rory elected for a mocktail instead).
