Khao Yai

Last weekend, Charnice and I went to Khao Yai, the oldest national park in Thailand. There a bit of downtime, so I ended up writing "real time" updates. So now you get a twitter-like representation of...The Trip!

Saturday, 3/28, 2:50 PM
I am lounging by a pond on a vinyl settee, listeninhg to the waterfall cascading into the pool and getting buzzed by flies (though not, for the moment, mosquitoes). The room for tonight, at Khao Yai Garden Lodge, is a double fan room with a shared bathroom, which smells kinda funky but is at least a real toilet. I was afraid we'd be camping out.

Despite the incessant heat, and the bugs, I am looking forward to going into the jungle tomorrow. I got a taste of that on Koh Chang, but I do miss nature in Bangkok. We're going on a tour run by the Garden Lodge - we'll see how it is. Tonight we're going on another tour, to the bat caves. Sounds exciting.

Sunday, 3/29, 8:02 AM
Sitting in the restaurant of the Garden Lodge, waiting for our jungle tour to leave. They are giving us leech socks, which implies leeches which...is just gross.

Last night we were taken to a cave temple by an old Thai guide called Tommy who was such a hippie, and alternatively called me "Tracy" and "Crazy." He was hilarious. Along the way he pulled over a couple of times to birdwatch, and pointed out parakeets and an owl. At the cave temple, he led us down some extremely narrow and slippery stairs, into a cave filled with horseshoe bats. We continued deeper, past old Buddhas and shrines, into another cave with bigger round leaf bats. There were thousands - smelled terrible but incredibly cool. Tommy showed us petrified wood, some that had turned almost crystalline over the years.

(Now we're underway with a new guide called J, but I'll finish this account in the converted pickup trucks we travel in).

In the caves, Tommy kept looking for a bug he nicknamed "Harry." He couldn't find it in the round leaf cave, so we crouched through a narrow passage and came out in a big cave where some roots were hanging from the ceiling. They belonged to a banyan tree Tommy had pointed out above ground, and the roots had punched through the rock into the cave below.

Nearby by a statue of Brahma, and a huge white Buddha lit from a hole above. And in the side caves off of there, Tommy finally found "Harry" - the scorpion-spider. Quite a hideous beast. Tommy let it crawl over his arms, unconcerned.

We left the caverns and drove to the foot of a large hill with a cave near its peak. We ate watermelon, waited for the big show, and talked about the way a rooster's crow is represented in different languages (cockadoodledoo vs eke-eke-eke (thai) vs co-co-roo-coo (japanese)). [By the way, I apologize to the linguists who read this for my terrible transcriptions]. What was the big show? At 6:15, millions of wrinkle-lipped bats streamed out of the cave in a black stream, headed to the jungle to feed. It was really quite epic.



2:22 PM
I am, at this moment, sitting in a sand-filled cave looking out over the base of a waterfall.



This morning we drove through the park, stopping to spot wildlife. We saw some white handed gibbons in a tree above the road - apparently it was an uncommon sight. It was extremely cool to realize I was seeing monkeys in the wild. We eventually got to the visitor's center, where I peeled off cavalierly to cross a footbridge (looked like wood and rope, but actually wood and steel) to wander a few yards into the jungle on my own. Saw a purple butterfly. Very pretty.


The group then proceeded to go on a 2-3 hour nature walk through the jungle. The leech socks were a VERY good idea. We saw a giant squirrel - and I do mean giant, apparently these things grow to 3 feet long. Not many other animals, but we saw strangling ficuses galore. These trees are nasty. I took a picture progression of what they do. First, they latch onto a big healthy tree, and grow up to the sun and down to the ground:


Second, they get really, really big and the host tree dies:

Third, they grow massive. They're also called banyan trees (same type with the roots that went into the cave yesterday). But, apparently their fruits are tasty for the local animals, so it isn't all bad.


I also discovered that apparently there is a lot of tree poaching here, in the form of sandalwood. 1 kilo of prime sandalwood will fetch...I think he said $30,000 but it might've been 30000 baht. Either way, it's plenty incentive for people to come into the park, chop out the good part of the tree and leave the rest to die, and take it out in a backpack.

After the nature walk, we lunched at a small restaurant at a campground and wandered about the stream there (and across another wood-steel bridge. These things apparently freak Charnice out but not me. I had fun with that).

Real time: something resembling a wet squirrel just wandered past, almost close enough for me to touch. The wildlife here are so tame - at lunch, a huge buck deer/moose/thing (no clue what it exactly was) came up and munched on some grass, completely unfazed by the half dozen humans rushing to photograph it.

Another sighting of note was a pink dragonfly. Combining two of my least favorite things, the color pink and bugs, yields...actually, a really cool looking bug.

After lunch we drove to the waterfall, and here I am. We're leaving in another fifty minutes to go to the scenic outlooks and try to spot wild elephants. In the meantime, I thinkm I'll go clamber over some more rocks.




This ends the realtime updates, but what transpired next...well, the logic worked for me. I climbed out on some rocks and sat watching the waterfall. I saw another cave behind the waterfall. The only problem, it would have required wading through the water to get to it, and I was lacking a bathing suit. But the water didn't look too deep, and it was warm out. So I handed my stuff to Charnice, and waded out to that cave. The water...turned out to be a little deeper than I antipated, but didn't come above the waist. I got out to the cave, and sat there watching the waterfall from behind. And I realized...well, I'm already wet, and when am I ever going to get the chance to swim in a waterfall again?

So, I did.





After the waterfall, we drove around for two hours, looking for elephants. We didn't see any, but what we did see were pig-tailed macaques. Dozens of them. Despite prohibitions on feeding the wildlife, many people do feed these friendly little monkeys, and so they wait by the side of the road for food. Makes for an adorable photo op, but apparently in other places monkeys who are accustomed to food from humans can become violent and aggressive, which is a shame.

We eventually got to the scenic outlook, which was nice but not the highlight of the trip (that was definitely the waterfall). After a few photos, we headed back to the trucks, and the long ride back to the lodge.