Day 4: Koh Samui and Bangkok, Thailand

Alas, the time has come for us to say good-bye to the loveliness of Koh Samui... since our Yacht trip had to be cancelled due to rain, we were once again enjoying sleeping in and lazying around for a day. After a late breakfast, and some blogging, we decide to hop on the motorbike one last time in search of...the Koh Samui Tiger Zoo. :)

Here's the obligatory shot of Ian on the motorbike. He swears he "popped a wheeley" a few seconds after this shot was taken. I think that means he got a flat tire.


The Tiger Zoo was located next to the Samui Aquarium at the very southern most tip of the island. You get to walk through the aquarium to get to the tigers, so we snapped a few shots along the way.


After a quick walk through the aquarium, we arrived just in time to catch the Tiger and Bird show -- kind of reminded me of my childhood and the Safari shows at the Toronto wildlife park.
The birds were kind of amusing too, but I was particularly taken with how they managed to only hire extremely attractive female trainers -- I had a sneaking suspicion that Ian was not complaining!
The picture above was the part of the show where they got kids from the audience to volunteer. They put little bean bags on their arms and even their heads and an eagle would swoop down and pick it off. That blur in the top left is an eagle in mid-swoop.

The coolest part, however, was when we got to take our picture with the Tiger -- he was ginormous! I didn't really feel scared or nervous since I figured he was pretty tame...but then the trainer kept mentioning that we should never put our hands on his head...which seemed like a dire-enough warning that I was a little relieved when I left the cage.


We went back to the western coast of the island in hopes of catching a sunset the second time around...and again, we were foiled by the rain. We did get some yummy crab curry though. I am rather ashamed to say that there was so much that I had to leave some of the crab uneaten (I know -- the horrors, Ming and un-eaten crab!).

In a bit of deja vu...we raced the rainstorm back to the hotel, just in time to catch our airport shuttle, stopping just once along the way to take one last look at the beach.


The Koh Samui airport, depending on your opinion, is either amazing or ridiculous. The entire airport is all open-air and outdoors. Instead of an airport mall, you have an outdoor "Park Avenue", and then you take open-air trams from the "boarding gates" to the individual airplanes. Personally, I think its the coolest airport ever. :)

After a short flight back to Bangkok, we catch our hotel shuttle to the airport hotel for some shut-eye before a morning flight. Next stop: Abu Dhabi!