two steps behind

C’mon, I’m serious! These are flying foxes.

A one day family trip (about 120 of us!) last week was truly exhausting from simply eating, taking nasp on the bus and taking photos from time to time. For this trip, we went to Chaochoengsao, a city about an hours drive east of Bangkok.

We went to so many places in the city that by the end of the day I thought it was a 5 day trip! As for today’s post, one of the most interesting places that our family visit is at the Temple, Wat Pho because it is where theses flying foxes have resided for years.

I vaguely remember some of this information provided by our tour guide.

Full grown flying foxes can weight up to 800 grams and will fly for miles to find food, particularly fruit.  The legend goes that these flying foxes are really intelligent and sensitive (or so they say that these flying foxes can understand human language) as there was one time that the temple were trying to hold a 9 days festival. The villager kept saying that who would come to this temple with all these flying foxes since their smell is unbearable! For some unexplainable reason, these flying foxes flew away a day before the festival began, allowing the temple to clean up the place and returned to the temple a day after the festival ended. Not one of them was present during the festival time.

Another story is that, the flying foxes are very emotionally sensitive and attached to the abbot of the temple. During and after the funeral of the abbot, these flying foxes start to drop dead without cause. The story was told that the abbot invited these flying foxes to reside here in the temple years ago. So they believe that the cause of death could be… grieving to death.

When I heard that we are going to see the flying foxes, I thought of just a few of them hanging around the tree. But I couldn’t be more wrong, there were hundreds of them! Another interesting phenomena is that, these flying foxes will only reside within the walls of the temple. This place is just so cool!

More info about the city, please visit http://www.chachoengsao.go.th/th/

It’s must have been a few days since I had uploaded this picture, but I hardly had the time to post anything. Oh well, here I am with my 5 minutes of time to post this picture.

I ran into a field of sunflowers the other day when I went with my grandmother for her regular health check up. Taking pictures of flowers sure is hard. The hardest part is to make the flower come “alive” on the photo. Fortunately I was with my Canon 85 mm lens, hence the resulting pictures were taken. The bees… bring everything to life in this picture! The picture shown below is actually cropped from the other picture.

Macro photography is fun!!