October 27th, 2024
At 8:30 in the morning, I met my guide at the tour office on
the main road. He introduced himself as
“Bowie” (not sure of the spelling). “I’m
Dave.” He immediately clued in that we were
the “David Bowie Team”! I got a chuckle
out of that.
After paying my 200 baht ($8) entrance fee to the national
park, we began our hike that was supposed to last four hours. Immediately Bowie pointed out a tiny fruit
bat that was sleeping under some palm branches that provided a nice, enclosed
space for him. I’m guessing that there’s
almost always a bat there in the morning, probably the same one.
At the entrance:
Next, he pointed out a massive spider on a web that spanned
about a meter between a couple of trees.
He showed me three tiny spiders around the perimeter of the web and explained
that those were the males and the big one in the middle was the female. Wow.
If the male did do his job properly in the mating ritual, I imagine that
was the end of him!
Hard to get perspective, but it was probably about 2-3 inches across.
Just a few hundred meters later, Bowie claimed that he could
smell monkeys. What?!? This guide is good! I couldn’t smell anything but thanks to my hay
fever, smelling is not one of my strong suits.
Sure enough, thirty meters further up the trail, which was actually more
of a road, we saw 7 monkeys high up in a tree.
A group of five Russians came walking up the path, with a couple of men
in the lead, and they just walked past us.
When the three women approached us, we pointed out the monkeys, or “ling”
in Thai, and the ladies were excited to see them. The men backtracked to check them out. You’d think it would be common sense to stop
and take a look when you are on a jungle trek and you see a guide stopped with
his client, looking up into the trees…
Young bamboo has stripes like this...never seen this before.
Later on, Bowie mentioned the monkey scent again and this
time I could smell it. It’s their urine
that is stinky. This time we couldn’t
find the perpetrator. It was at this
point that I realized that I should have gone on last night’s hike as this was
not a trail, it was a rough road through the forest. I thought we’d be hiking a narrow trail where
one would get wet from brushing against wet foliage. Oh well, who knew…obviously not me.
A highlight of the hike was supposed to be a waterfall,
which as I mentioned in a previous post is not a big attraction to me, but we took
a side trail down to the river and could see a 10-15 meter high waterfall,
although some of it was obscured by trees.
The rain had started to fall too so I put on my $4 rain jacket (since I
lost my expensive raincoat somewhere over the last 3-4 days). The long button-up jacket does do a better
job in keeping my shorts dry compared to my lost jacket, but it doesn’t breathe
so after a while you feel just as wet on the inside from your sweat.
The waterfalls:
We reached a “checkpoint”, which was really a small shelter and
some toilets. Bowie cut up a pineapple
and I sat and enjoyed the view of the river for about half an hour before we
hiked back.
The view from the shelter:
As we approached the entrance to the park, we saw a few more
monkeys, quite close up. It seemed that
the best action was closest to the Khao Sok village which was odd.
The hike was alright, but not really worth the price of
admission. Bowie was a good guide though
and I thanked him for his service and gave him a decent tip.
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