When Chica told her Thai colleagues at work in Bangkok that she was planning a trip to Khao Sok National Park in Southern Thailand, they all said “never heard of it”. My Thai teacher was the same. Although Khao Sok appears in the Thai Tourism Authority “Unseen Thailand” Promotion, it seems to genuinely deserve the title, as it is still unknown to, and certainly unseen by most Thais. The area has been a national park for only 20 years or so - the creation of the national park coincided with the construction of a huge hydro-electric dam. Local legend says that the dam was constructed as much to flood out the communists who were living in the area as it was to generate electricity, but whatever the reason, flooding the valleys not only created power for the south, but also created one of the most beautiful lakes in South East Asia. In fact, the area is made up of several national parks next to each other, but the lake is located in Khao Sok,
We flew into Krabi from Bangkok and rented a car for the 2-hour drive up, although once we arrived we didn’t really need the car and could just have well caught a minibus up for 200 baht. We looked around at a few bungalows next to the nearly dry river that runs just outside the park gates, until we came down to the edge of the river and saw a wire suspension bridge crossing the river between two giant trees. The suspension bridge was so wild and, well, just cool, that we had to cross it to see what was on the other side.
The suspension bridge
Khao Sok Nature ResortThat was how we found our treehouse in the forest. We asked the bungalow owner, a nice Thai woman called Ae if we could see some bungalows. “Sure”, she said, “they’re all unlocked – just go and have a look”. This sounded nice – any place where the bungalows are left unlocked creates a good impression right from the start. We wandered off into the jungle under the massive limestone cliff looking for bungalows – and couldn’t find any. The Khao Sok Nature Resort lives up to its name. There are only half a dozen treehouse bungalows scattered over a huge area on the edge of the forest – and from the restaurant we couldn’t see them at all. We walked into the forest until finally we saw a treehouse in the distance. This was where we knew we had to stay. Our treehouse was simple – the bole of the tree grew up through the middle of the hut built 5 metres off the ground. Inside was a double bed, a mosquito net, a simple but clean toilet and a cold shower head nailed to the tree trunk. It was appropriately named the “Tarzan and Jane House”.
Tarzan and Jane HutSettled down, we relaxed in our treehouse listening to the cicadas until hunger drove us out. So we walked to the restaurant, ate dinner and booked ourselves onto a tour of the lake for the following day.
As we started to climb the ladder to Tarzan and Jane after dinner, I saw a glowing bug by the base of the tree. It was a firefly. We took our torches and set off for a walk to see if there were any more. The jungle was completely alive with thousands of fireflies flicking their lamps on and off. It looked like ten-thousand camera flashes at the kick-off of a World Cup final - like a thousand fairies dancing in the woods to the beat of secret rave-music that only they could hear. We crossed back over the bridge and walked along a track in the jungle darkness surrounded by the light show until we came to a small outdoor bar in a clearing. The tables were treetrunks, and the chairs were grass mats with traditional triangular Thai cushions. The music was tacky early-90s easy listening, but the people were friendly, the beer was cold and the light show was amazing.
Afterwards, we walked back through the fairy rave to our treehouse, wrapped ourselves in the mosquito net and fell asleep to the sound of the crickets as it started to gently rain.
The jungleWhen you live in the jungle, I guess punctuality is not a major virtue, so our 8:30 pickup for the lake tour came around half-past 9. We wandered down to the river to watch the baby monkeys playing in the trees while we waited. Then we were taken in the back of a pick-up to another bungalow to wait some more for the other members of our tour. We all started calling it “Khao Sok time” – but it was beautiful and nobody cared.
Long-tailed macaque?An hour-long drive took us to the pier where our international group (8 people, 8 nationalities – German, Austrian, Dutch, French, English, Danish, Japanese and Australian) boarded a long-tail boat. The ride across the lake was like being taken for a tour through an old Chinese ink-painting. Stunning 300 metre limestone cliffs covered with jungle cascading down to the quiet lake.
Lake from our long-tail boatThey call it the ‘Guilin of Thailand’. It reminded us of a smaller-scale version of Haolong bay in Vietnam, not surprising as the limestone is apparently the remains of a giant coral reef that once ran all the way down South East Asia.
Our raft hutsAfter an hour in our boat, we arrived at the bamboo raft houses run by the national park, ate our packed lunch (rice wrapped in banana leaves), swam (the lake water was warmer than your bathtub), then set off for a hike through the jungle to a cave. This was where we saw the butterflies. Hundreds of butterflies. By the clumps of green butterfly eggs on the rocks, we assumed it was some butterfly orgy – it was beautiful. Large black butterflies with blue wings, bright yellow butterflies, white butterflies. Hundreds of butterflies all sitting on the ground flapping together, landing on our hands and heads as fluorescent blue and green dragonflies buzzed along the stream beside. The yellow butterflies fell in love with the yellow towel that I’d taken along to wipe away the jungle sweat, and refused to leave me, flocking to the corner of the towel poking out of my pocket.
Butterfly orgyBut most fun of all was the cave. You know what most cave tours are like back home – lights, stairs, pathways. This cave had none of those. It had apparently been used as a hideout for the communists from the 60s to the 80s, but there was no trace of human inhabitation except for the remains of charred bamboo from cooking fires – the locals must still go there for bbqs at night. We turned on our torches and went into the cave – stopping to admire the giant scorpion spiders, fish in the underground river, and flocks of bats on the cave ceiling. A couple of times inside the cave there was no space by the river, so we had to swim in the cool, deep river with our torches in our mouths. Our guide, Bom, an ex-park ranger, gathered all our cameras into his bag and held it over his head as he swam through the river. If you ever go on one of these cave tours – beware the “frog-handshake” at the end. Bom likes to pick up giant frogs from the river and hold them out to his guests in the darkness as they leave the cave saying “just hold this for a minute, would you?” We thought someone was drowning when we heard the scream. Never knew German men could scream like that… Bom also showed us how to make a “display frog” – you pick up the frog, cover its eyes, turn it upside down and shake it gently, and it is stunned for a minute. He then puts the frog onto a rock in a buddha-pose where it sits meditating for a minute until it wakes up and jumps back into the river.
River in the jungleWetter than wet, we walked back through the butter- and dragonflies to the boat. The evening was spent swimming, eating and drinking Thai whisky on the raft houses. We also went out in the boat for a night safari, but saw nothing apart form a few sleepy Hornbills and a mysterious pair of red eyes in the top of a tree. Apparently there are wild elephants, tapirs, sunbears and tigers in the forest, but they stay in the deep jungle during the dry season, and didn’t show up to be seen by us.
Next morning we went out in the boat again looking for gibbons. We knew they were there by the wild hooting we could hear, but all we saw were some pig-tailed macaques and a solitary dusky langur. Oh, we also saw a wild chicken, which seemed to excite our boat driver, but none of us were particularly impressed. It didn’t matter – the lake was so beautiful, and the gibbon calls so entrancing, that just being out in the boat was enough.
Back to the raft houses for breakfast, we packed up and got back in our boat for trip to climb up to a viewpoint on the way back to the pier. The climb up was steep, hot and hard, but the view from the top was worth it – the lake and limestone cliffs stretched out in a vista in front of us - for about 10 minutes until the rain started to fall like somebody broke the sky. At the end of the dry season, the rain normally falls for 20 minutes then it is back to hot and sunny, but on this day, it started raining and didn’t really stop for the next three days. Climbing down the hill, some of us caught our leeches before they could get attached – including Bom who had a leech crawl up his shorts and try to attach itself to his penis – but two of our group didn’t even notice until we got back to the national park headquarters two hours later and they were covered in blood (stomach and legs, fortunately). They apparently didn’t even feel the leeches gorging themselves on tasty foreigner blood.
View over the lakeThe ride back in the pickup was freezing cold for us inside the cab – Thais hate to turn off the airconditioner more than they hate anything, so even though we were soaked to our underwear and freezing cold, the driver refused to turn off the airconditioner or open the windows. Chica caught a cold from that and had a fever that night back in our bungalow. I’m sure that most Thais would rather you slapped them round the face with a week-long dead fish than ask them to turn off the airconditioner.
After that, we spent one more night watching rain fall from the broken sky in our bungalow, then drove down to Krabi to catch a minibus down to the island of Koh Lanta, but that’s another story.
One of the great things about a trip to Southern Thailand at the moment is that everything you do, no matter how much fun it is, gives you a double hit of good feeling because not only are you enjoying yourself, you are contributing to the tsunami relief effort. Khao Sok national park, in the mountains that run down the spine of Southern Thailand were obviously not directly affected by the boxing day tsunami – no wave is going to cover the 80 or so kilometers from the coast and penetrate into the mountains. But the locals living next to Khao Sok nevertheless have increasingly come to rely on eco-tourism, both from the few Thais who know of the park’s existence, and from foreigners making short trips up from the resorts of Phuket and Krabi. This year, there have been almost no tourists, but even though everybody is economically suffering, all the people we met at Khao Sok were warm and friendly – overall, it was one of the ‘funnest’ trips we’ve done so far in Thailand.
If'n you're really interested:
click
here for the Khao Sok N.P. webpage
