Along that main road you find lots of commercial premises, especially along the North and East coast. Many places either cater to tourists directly or support the tourism industry on the island in some sort of way. Imagine a restaurant/cafe/bar, followed by a motorbike rental place, followed by a mini-mart, followed by a pharmacy, followed by a massage place, followed by a cheap clothes shop ... and then it starts all over again.
The main attractions on the island are either religious shrines, natural sights (like the odd waterfall or stone formation) plus some animal-related experiences...but more about that later in this blog entry.
To be honest, some of these attractions felt mainly like a good excuse to put up some more souvenir stalls.
Starting off with the religious shrines, there are three big statues which are hard to miss in the Northeast corner of the island - all of which are quite new, very colourful and, ...well, big.
There is the Big Buddha, the Happy Buddha and the Chinese Lady Monk (which has 18 arms, which - no doubt - comes in handy for multi-tasking):
And it was at the Big Buddha that Fiona found Nirvana - under the careful supervision of the local monk. Before Fiona could completely float away though, we were saved by more souvenir shops...
Talking of monks, the next monk we saw didn't look too well:
Probably something to do with the fact that he passed away 37 years ago. They built a shrine for him, where he still sits today like he always did - praying (and wearing his favourite Ray Ban sunglasses).
(NB: Above mentioned mummified monk made another re-appearance late last night into our lives, when Fiona proclaimed she couldn't fall asleep because of the "scary monk". Well, in the end sleep prevailed...)
After all this religious inspiration we had two more highlights on our trip yesterday - both to do with animals.
First up, was some serious elephant trekking!!!
In pairs of two, we boarded our seats high above the ground on the back of some elephants. And were carried around along forest trails and through shallow creeks. It was all a bit shakey, but a great experience. And free air ventilation was provided courtesy of the giant elephants' ears.
Back on the ground, one more special animal encounter awaited us.
Lucy and Fiona elegantly stepped into Siegfried & Roy's shoes and bottle-fed Sexy, a 3-months old tiger baby:
Thank God, Sexy was more interested in drinking her milk bottle than playing with Lucy and Fiona. Quite a big cat for 3 months... I wonder what is in that milk?!
The kids were (rightly) proud of their braveness and we were, well, just glad that it all went smoothly without any scratches for anyone.
It was a busy day. Looks like we'll now need at least a few days again on the beach to recover;-)
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