Lumpini park – an urban wildlife photo-shoot
Bangkok, Thailand, 2012-10-09 12:00 by Laerke



Lumpini park is Bangkok's green lung, offering fresh air and a bit of peace and tranquility in the middle of this busy metropolis. This huge park dates back to the 1920s and is today a popular hang-out spot for the locals. Here you will find older people practicing tai chi, body builders pumping in the outdoor gym and young couples enjoying each other's company along the lakeshore. The park is not just for people though; you can find a surprising amount of animals here, from birds and squirrels to cute turtles and large monitor lizards, the latter easily growing to more than a full meter.

We’d come to enjoy a picnic in the park, and I’d brought my camera because I wanted to get some shots of the monitor lizards that are so often seen around the lake.

We spread out our picnic blanket near the lake and soon after I spotted a monitor lizard swimming towards shore with a (very) dead fish in its mouth! It was really interesting to see this guy bring it up on land and thereafter try to eat it; it took him a good 15 minutes to get it down as monitor lizards have no teeth and instead have to swallow their prey whole. Unfortunately for him the fish was a bit on the large side and he couldn’t really get it down in one bite. So he started bashing it against a tree trunk in order to get into more manageable pieces.






After the monitor lizard had finished his lunch and we’d also finished our lunch I saw a little head breaking the surface of the lake – it was a turtle coming up for air! A little later I noticed another turtle sunning itself on the bank, he let me get really close so I got some great head shot of him :)




Another very common animal in Bangkok’s parks is the squirrel. I can watch these cute, little guys for hours, as they scurry up and down tree trunks and jump from tree branch to tree branch. They are quite the little athletes, and they think nothing of hanging head down munching on a snack!




Lumpini is a great place for a quiet picnic. We bought ours, consisting of fried chicken, sticky rice, som tam (papaya salad) and pineapple for desert, from the many stalls just outside the park. We also considered taking a ride in a swan-shaped pedal-boat, but we’ll save that for next time :)

It is nice to take a little breather and to be surrounded by greenery for a an hour or two, while the city's skyscrapers protruding from over treetops serves as a reminder that you are in fact still in the middle of one of the world's largest and greatest cities.

We’ll finish up with probably the least exotic animal – the pigeon. Nobody really loves the pigeons, but you can’t get around the fact that they are very common all over Thailand (and the rest of the world for that matter).