Monday, November 10, 2014

Sok it to me!

On my last night in Ao Nang, I was eating dinner with a hostel-mate, and it turned out that he was going up to Khao Sok National Park just like me!
I convinced him to wake up early and take the same van that I was taking. When we arrived, we made arrangements to leave the next morning and spend two days out at Cheow Lan Lake in the park. This lake was formed when a dam was built just downstream of the park. The lake gets up to 40m deep in the middle and has these amazing limestone cliffs shooting straight up out of the water. Our group included a Russian family with two little children (one still in diapers), a few girls traveling with their aunt, and four or five others all in their twenties. It was an interesting group. We went out kayaking, rode around in the longtail boat to look for monkeys and went trekking up to a cave full of weird creatures.

Our rooms on the lake.

The front of the cave was maybe 3km from where the boat let us off and we followed a pretty clear path the entire way. We had to cross a stream a few times. It's always fun when you're walking out of muddy water and hear the guide yell "Everyone! Leech check!!" Luckily they don't really like me the same way that mosquitoes do. While we were walking, we passed by an area in the jungle where the communist leaders in Thailand used to meet in secrecy about thirty years ago. We also went by a trench that was the remnant of a communist bunker from around the same time. When we finally reached the cave, we headed into it with headlamps. Apparently when the water is lower, its possible to intertube through this area. Blargh no thanks. Once we got far enough into the cave that there was no light from the entrance, we started seeing life. Bats, cave crickets, crabs. Cool right? Then I noticed the weird eyes reflecting back at me from the walls of the cave. Upon further examination they were cave spiders as big as my hand. And scary fast. As you can imagine, there is a large part of Thailand that is currently engulfed in flame. But really.

The bamboo was massive.

I asked one of the Thai guys how poisonous the spiders were. He said "Not very. Just itchy." Ok cool. Then my friend says "I asked him [the second Thai guide] how poisonous the spiders were, and he said "Dead."" Clearly they both cannot be right.

Bats

I survived through both the spiders and the leeches!  We ate a ridiculous amount of amazing food and got to swim in water that was almost too warm (dare I say that?). This trip to the south of Thailand was the first time that I had ever been in water that was that warm. The ocean water didn't feel refreshingly cool, and when we swam in the lake while it rained the water was easily warmer than the air. And the lake is 40m deep! It's not just the top few inches that are warm.


Good morning world!
On our last full day, we wandered around the park. Turns out that four of the falls are closed during the rainy season so we did't get to see much. I did have one Russian man ask me if he should panic because his daughter got bitten by a leech. Yes, definitely panic.