On page 1112, I posted two photos from a 16-shot essay that I have just completed — and below are four more. You can view the complete essay by clicking here. [Press “L” to see the pictures a their full size, and then navigate through the essay.]
The essay is on \"Sam Roi Yod”, which means “three hundred peaks\" and applies to a range of dramatic limestone hills that rise up from the coastal plain at the edge of the Gulf of Thailand, about 250 km south of Bangkok. The area is a national park, whose wet-land ecology has been devastated by years of illegal shrimp farming, cattle raising and poaching.
A traveler driving across the national park — two bitumen-paved roads cut through it — will see the natural beauty but only some indications of the environmental damage: plastic bags littering the ponds and beaches, and shrimp farms along the periphery as well as within the boundaries of the park. But the extent of the damage — poisoning of the ponds and soil by the effluents from shrimp farms — will not be visible. What is not there cannot be seen: the former richness of the waterfowl and of the flowering lotus ponds.
When I stopped at a coffee shop on the way to a pond famous for its lotus blossoms, a woman asked me whether I was going to worship at the temple that had been built there because, if I was going to drive 30 km to see the lotus blossoms, she didn’t want me to be disappointed. At the pond, a park official told me that he had been trying to plant lotus there for the last 10 years without success.
