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Saz and Dave's travels
We intended to get up early today and go on the motorbike to the beach in the National park in the North-West of the island. However we kind of overslept and also didnt fancy another day on the beach as we were quite burned. Instead we decided to go on the motorbike to the Bang Pae waterfall on the North East of the island and to the Gibbon Rehabitation Centre which is next to the waterfall. This was quite a lot further away from Patong than the beach we went to yesterday and it took about 2 hours before we got to the entrance of Phra Taew National Park (where the waterfall is and where we also had to pay a 200 baht entrance fee each.) The ride here was much better than yesterday apart from one awful moment when Dave, attempting to turn left onto the road almost veered directly into a car on the opposite side of the road! In general though the hills were much smoother today and we even got upto 60 km/h at one point!
When we got to the national park the first thing we did was go to the gibbon rehabilitation centre. Here a very friendly American girl showed us around and explained a bit about the project. Basically, the project aims to rescue as many pet gibbons as it can and then resocialise and re-educate them and eventually release them back into the wild. You see lots of gibbons are kept as pets in Thailand, and many are used to make money by their owners getting tourists to pay to get their photos taken with them. However this is only possible when the gibbons are young. When they hit adolescence and grow their big canine teeth they can become quite aggresive. At this point many owners abondon the gibbons in the wild where they die as they don't know how to fend for themselves or the owners drug them so they can carry on using them for photo opportunities, It was all very sad but it's good to see something is being done about it. At one point while we were looking round one of the gibbons started to sing which was a really strange sound. After lunch, we went to have a look at the waterfall that was 10 minutes up a little path. This however wasn't as nice as we hoped as all the little pools were full of local kids and there was no chance for a swim. We decided instead to follow the path on up through the rainforest seeing a load of cool plants and big bugs. If we'd had time we could have followed the path for another 3 km to another waterfall but we had to get the bike back by 6pm so couldn't do that today. We turned back and feeling very hot and sticky got on the bike and rode back to our hotel. Having stayed covered up for the whole day today, our sunburn had gone down considerably which was good. As it was our last night in Phbuket and we felt like western food we went to a pizza restaurant (like Pizza Hut) and got pizza, coke, salad and croissant ham things. Even through the pizzas were quite small we found them really hard to finish - probably because we have been eating less here! I don't think we could have managed the 12" pizzas we used to get (one each) at uni anymore! After tea we went and drank the other bottle of wine from the BA flight and went to bed
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