Soc Trang,
Vietnam
Friday, December 28, 2007
Today we hopped on a local bus and travelled 2 hours (60kms) south to the small town of Soc Trang. Our reasons? We wanted to see bats.....lots of bats. Just outside the town centre is the Chua Doi Pagoda, and the grounds of the pagoda are home to hundreds of fruit bats. Fruit bats are often called "flying foxes" because they have snouts similar to a fox, and are brown in colour. With a wing-span of 1.5 meters, they are pretty impressive to see. As we were there during the day, they were mostly asleep in the trees above us (watch out for guano!!) but there were some bats moving about. They certainly make a lot of shrieking noises, and they can climb about in the trees similar to a monkey. It was VERY cool to see them.
Hopefully no nightmares tonight though!
