Nong Nooch Botanical Garden

It’s fairly easy to describe the gardens at Nong Nooch. It was your average run-of-the-mill dinosaur laden, golden shrine speckled, sports car displaying, bonsai tree growing, terra cotta acid tripping, Persian cat petting zoo. Tourist trap? Absolutely – but a surprisingly unique one.

Being a botanical garden, it does have alot of the green stuff…

However, it’s not really the way you’d expect to see it. For starters, it’s completely overshadowed by the head-scratching plethora of animal statues. Displayed in groups of 100+ for each species represented, there were everything from bears to meerkats to cows to ants to penguins. It didn’t seem to have any rhyme, reason, or particular purpose…

Then we came upon the thing you always find in botanical gardens, the extensive collection of dinosaurs.

Dinosaur Valley

When I first happened upon these fangy figures, I wrote them off as a kiddie attraction. As we wandered deeper in, we were all overtaken by the scale, quantity and quality of the replicas. Thousands of full scale monsters – vividly colored and dynamically posed.

Of course, the French Garden was well represented just as it was 100 million years ago, with a thingysaurous, buddha temple, collection of golden shrines and Dr. Who phone booths.

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The Carazoic Era

Following the historical timeline, the Jurassic section was perfectly adjacent to the sports car museum.

Zephyr and I love cars and salivated all over this guy’s collection. You’ll see the words “Al Baan Nawk” on alot of these. Nai told us it’s like his catch phrase and means “I’m a country boy”

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Smooshy Faces

As expected, the car museum had a room full of Persian cats and, missing our own, we poured our affection upon them. Persian cats have a countenance that looks right at home with either a Royal Family or James Bond Villian

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The Pot Farm

Proving the old adage ‘More is more’, the terra cotta pot farm showed all the wonderful things you can do (and a few you probably shouldn’t) with red clay.

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Where are the food pictures?

After such a day, a proper refueling was required. Nai took us to a sweet ocean side restaurant where the fruits of the sea mingled with citrus, lemongrass and Thai chili. We dined on serpents head fish, sea bass, shrimp and asparagus.

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What, No Durian?

Of course there was! How could I resist when it’s royal repugnance was for sale in the form of a popsicle (poopsicle?). If you don’t know why I would call it that, read this.

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