Bangkok: Giant Reptiles Reclaim the City

Once driven to the city's edges, Bangkok's giant monitor lizards are now thriving in parks and canals – and becoming an unexpected part of the visitor experience.

Shortly before dawn in one of Bangkok's largest inner-city green spaces, there is a stillness in the canals that surround Lumphini Park. Barely a ripple disturbs its large ponds. But as the day breaks in the Thai capital, the first scaly snouts emerge from the water’s surface.

These are Asian water monitors, the world's second-largest lizard after the Komodo dragon.

For travellers, Bangkok's monitor lizards are not an attraction in the traditional sense, but a reminder of how nature persists even in the world's most-visited city. To encounter these ancient reptiles, a species which dates back millions of years, in Lumphini Park – a short walk from luxury hotels, shopping malls and embassies – is to glimpse the city's ecological past, when this was an area of wetlands and waterways rather than expressways and skyscrapers. Watching the lizards bask beside joggers and picnickers is a unique travel experience: one that requires no ticket, no guide and no curated enclosure, only an early morning walk through the city's green heart.

While Lumphini Park is the easiest place for visitors to spot them, Bangkok's water monitors are far from confined to a single green space. Once pushed to the city's edges, the reptiles have quietly adapted to life in the megacity, patrolling many of the almost 1,700 canals that still thread through neighbourhoods, from residential backstreets to busy commercial zones. Several hundred water monitors are thought to live in and around Lumphini Park alone, drawing locals, tourists and photographers into uneasy proximity with an animal that has long divided public opinion.

"Their population in Bangkok is much, much greater than you'd ever see in the wild," said Michael Cota, a retired associate at Thailand's National Science Museum, speaking from his study in northern Thailand. Surrounded by leaning towers of academic papers – including several of his own – he explained why. "When it comes to food, they'll eat anything they can get a hold of, dead or alive. They're extreme generalists."

"Head to Lumphini Park," he had told me earlier, with a giddy grin. "That's where you'll get to know them properly."

- Author: Gordon Cole-Schmidt, BBC