One for the road...: February 2011

Inside all of us is... hope. Inside all of us is... fear. Inside all of us is... adventure. Inside all of us is a wild thing. ~Where the Wild Things Are

Sometimes a video is the best option…

Singapore

Everyone who knows me knows that I absolutely melt for animals…especially wild animals. Give me a wild thing to be “near” and I am the happiest girl…they make me feel alive…the give the world a bigger picture…they refresh my soul…and above all they are just so stinkin’ cute! Luckily for me, Fint shares this love of all things wild and the love of being outdoors in nature.

Knowing this about me (and him wanting to avoid yet another street market that I will for sure drag him to on the weekends), my awesome hubby arranged for us to have an outdoor date day, walking in the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in Singapore and it did not disappoint.

Fintan Fact: In the video above, Fintan mentions that Singapore is the second most populous country in the world, what he meant to say was, "It is the second most densely populated country in the world. With a population density in excess of 7,700 people per Sq. KM."

Nature, for me, is the best remedy for the modern life. With technology speeding ahead and more and more shocking things happening on the TV and in the world (nothing can surprise us anymore at this rate) it is so nice to have something that we can still be in awe of. To stop and say wow, that is just amazing and not manmade! Stopping and smelling the roses, one could say.

There is nothing I enjoy more that a nice dose of nature…I say this, however, from the comfort of my City Center Condo, while sitting on my balcony overlooking the famous “Pub Street” in KL…all things in moderation. Nonetheless, I do enjoy nature and wild animals…I enjoy them more then shopping (most of the time!). I am, after all, a Northern Michigan girl, and those “ruts” (roots in my MI accent) go deep.

So back to my wildlife encounters of late, sea otters!, monitor lizards!, monkeys, spiders (more of those stinkers), and crabs in trees! The sea otters were my favorites though…the cutest things ever! The adult ones were right up there in the cute level of baby hippos, baby dolphins and that is no small feat on the cuteness meter! They “snuck” out of the water, looked right at me, and then decided to roll around on the path in front of us for me to video tape…thus they became my new best buddies!

The crabs up in the trees were definitely one of the oddest things I have seen so far. Hundreds of crabs escape the water of the mangroves by climbing up trees…so essentially you have an icky forest of water spiders up in the trees. We didn’t notice them at first, because they blended in with the trees due to their “muddy” brown color…but once we spotted one, they all became clear as day!