It’s always nice to come across wildlife while traveling. In Asia, I’ve seen a lot of wildlife such as monitor lizards, birds, snakes, and of course, monkeys, out and about. While I saw most of them in rural areas, temples, or while hiking, sometimes I saw them inside the city such as in parks.
Lumpini Park in Bangkok is well-known for its hordes of monitor lizards crawling and swimming around, so much so that I was disappointed only to see just four or five when I was there. Besides reptiles, birds, and the ever-present monkeys, the largest Asian animal I’ve ever seen were Asian elephants. This wasn’t in the wild though (I’ve seen wild elephants in Africa), but at a Sri Lanka elephant orphanage as well as one walking on the road, and outside major temples like Ayutthaya being used to give tourists rides. Sri Lanka is a great country to see animals as I saw everything from parakeets to monitors to bats to elephants. Taiwan is good for giant spiders weaving webs over hiking paths.
Pair of parakeet, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Elephant on the road, also in Sri Lanka
Monkeys in Malaysia (above and below)
Monitors in Lumpini Park (above and below)
Fruit bats, Peraniya Botanical Gardens, Sri Lanka (above and below)
Elephant orphanage herd, Sri Lanka
Deer, Nara, Japan
Deer, Miyajima, Japan
Monkeys again, Sri Lanka
Monitor lizard in a village path, Sri Lanka
Green forest lizard, Sri Lanka
Colorful parrotfish, Galle, Sri Lanka
Small blacktip reef shark, Galle, Sri Lanka
Horned lizard, Krabi, Thailand
Snakes seen while hiking, Taipei, Taiwan
Giant spider, Taipei, Taiwan
Hong Kong kite, Hong Kong
