Briefly back to Bangkok, where a visit to Lumphini Park in the centre was memorable mainly for the audacity and sheer front of the resident (and wild) Water Monitors, ranging in size from less than a metre to, well, freaking huge.
After my first run-in with a particularly mighty individual in Suan Rot Fai a few days earlier, when (much to fellow birder Dave's amusement) it crashed out of a tree and missed me by mere centimetres before thankfully running in the opposite direction in a hail of expletives, it became second nature to find them swimming, dozing up trees, or walking across open areas in the park.
In Lumphini however they're obviously so ambivalent towards Homo sapiens that they effectively pretended we weren't there, which made finding a picnic spot more interesting than usual.
