12 days in Bangkok - day 6 - Lumphini park, Queen Sirikit park, playing with long exposure.

Greetings, readers!

I now, I know, I skipped days 4 and 5. That's due to the fact that one of my friends decided to have a stag party in Thailand, and in the end he found 3 more friends that were willing to join him. They made a 4 day stop in Bangkok, so we met the day before yesterday and got a little bit drunk; I knew what was going to happen and didn't even bother taking my camera with me.

Because I dislike alcohol and very seldom drink (420 FTW), I had an unpleasant hangover the day after. So I went to do the laundry and took the whole day off to replenish a bit, which means no pics from yesterday either.

Which brings me to today, when I've had it with doing nothing and decided to go explore some parks around here. The first on my list was the closest to my accommodation - Lumphini park, famous for being the dwelling of numerous monitor lizards, a subspecies of Varanus.

In 2016 the authorities had to deport more than 100 of them, because the food - they mostly eat dead fish and turtles - was so abundant that in some cases they grew up to 3 metres and damaged a lot of park's flora. Of course they also scared some tourists despite not being dangerous to humans at all.

After about 45 minutes of walking, I arrived to the park. I made some shots of the park itself, just to give you some perspective on what it looked like:

If you look closely at the photo above, you can spot the same flowers on the tree in the front that all the girls in Fiji are putting in their hair.

I liked the crooked trees in this one:

This is a traditionally built pavilion I saw just after entering the park:

After taking a few snaps of the surroundings, it was time to start hunting live prey :) At first, I couldn't see any lizards, but soon after getting close to the ponds that are all over the place, I started to see them all around. So, without further ado, here are my favourite photos of our overlords:

I came upon a couple of lizards that were chilling with a murder of crows (which are abundant in the park as well):

While wandering around, I spotted this statue, and it looked interesting to me, so I checked the plaque standing by the road, and the name of the statue is - wait for it - Women In The Next Three Decades. If anyone finds this offensive, please address the author:

I made a couple of cityline shots as well, since I don't get a chance to do them too often:

After those photos, I headed back towards the exit, when I saw a crow carrying a bone from leftover meal in a plastic bag:

I also liked this particular flower, don't ask me why:

At the exit from the park I encountered park security officers. I should mention, that - obviously - littering isn't allowed in the park, but what's more interesting is that smoking is banned too, as well as profanity. These officers are there to upkeep order, and one of them was kind enough to pose for a picture for my blog:

Next stop on my schedule was the Queen Sirikit park. Since it was named after the Thai queen - in honour of her 60th birthday in 1992 - I expected a bit more from it than what I actually saw. Although the park is known by its biodiversity of flora and many different species of butterflies, I must say that I found Lumphini much more interesting.

As I was late for a meeting with my friends, I took a quick walk around all the major areas and only made two photos; I liked the turquoise boat in this scene:

And this wavy, meandering bridge:

The park also has quite a lot of water bodies - ponds and fountains, in which there's a lot of lotus flowers, but I don't really find them too interesting anymore so I didn't take any pictures of them.

After spending the afternoon with my friends - one of them had a birthday today - I was playing with long exposure of traffic, as I plan to do some nicer shots from higher up tomorrow evening:

That's all for today folks, have a nice day and see you again tomorrow!