DUMP IN PARADISE

Paradise, a beautiful tropical untouched island in the midst of nowhere. A place where animals can live free and pro- tected. This is what I thought about the national park ofKoh Tarutao in Thailand, close to the Malaysian border. My mother went there 30 years ago and told me about the beau- ty of this island. When I wanted to see that with my own eyes it was gone.

Not the island but the magic of it. Plastic, plastic, and more plastic. Everywhere you look you can find at least one bot- tle, net or even computers. No people other than rangers live on this island, but the currents and the monsoon bring the trash of the mainland to this precious place.Amid all this trash I found a big group of water monitors.

I spend two days with these ancient lizards that grow upto 3 meters and it made me feel really bad to see them liv- ing in such a dirty place. I documented how they lived on this trash pile which is affecting them in a lot of ways. Their normal diet are smaller mammals or sometimes even the wild boars, but in recent years more and more monitors were seen eating human trash. This world is changing and all living beings with it. We decide in which direction it will change in the future.