Discovering the creatures

Rainy season had ended, leaving Khon Kaen in Thailand’s North East sweltering with a heavy dampness. I was doing an elective from Melbourne, a vital part of my Physiotherapy degree where I worked long days in desperately poor community health centres, and overcrowded hospitals where patients groaned on gurneys in dirty hallways. I taught lepers how to walk with prosthetic limbs and assisted nurses dressed in seventies-style white nurse uniforms, often helping secure open chest drains filtering slowly into glass Coke bottles. The patients were kind, the staff were friendly, but despite the meaningful work I craved a break from the heaviness of the health sphere, as most twenty-year-olds would. One of these breaks started with a quest to see dinosaur bones.

My senior lecturer had mentioned the fossils so I jumped on a bus and settled into the sweaty vinyl seats. I asked a shop owner about the bones, but she spoke no English, and my words meant absolutely nothing. Using charades, I tried to convey the word dinosaur. I walked back and forth roaring, flailing my hands around dramatically, my elbows tucked in at my sides, and stomping my feet in an attempt to mimic a T-rex on a rampage. Apparently my impression needed work and the Thai shop owner understood nothing, so I moved on.

Eighty feet down the road I saw a towering Thai temple with the classic gleaming gold roof edgings curving dramatically upward. As I approached it, I saw a hundred or more brown, green and yellow tortoises walking around the luscious yard surrounding the temple. Big ones, small ones, some with dome-shaped shells and others with flat, horned shells, all wandering around happily amongst the small plants at the perimeter of the garden, and the small pools of water.

After carefully tiptoeing around the creatures, I saw the sparse interior of the temple housed dozens more tortoises. Small bowls of water were dotted around the room to keep them hydrated, and pieces of fresh grapes, apples and dark leafy vegetables were strewn loosely around the temple floor. I can always respect the reverence of a temple or religious place, but this had a heart-warming quality of no church or temple I’de ever been to. That these creatures were so beautifully cared for and respected, particularly in such a poor region of the world where their natural habitat is often decimated by rubbish, was incredibly moving. I smiled for so long afterwards I must have looked drunk.