Do you know where you are?

You’re in the jungle, baby.  Well, you will be if we can get to the train station in time.
Khao Yai is a National Park about 3 hours East of Bangkok, part of the Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai Forest Complex; a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Khao Yai is the easiest part to access but, even then, you need a car and/or a guided tour.  Abby and I are on a crazy 1.5 day tour package out of Bangkok, starting with a train ride.

Off to a flying start, we miss the train.  The “super express” leaving at 11am became the local 10:10am.  Guess I shouldn’t have trusted the official website and instead read our hard copy tickets more carefully.  Plan B means another lengthy, slow taxi ride to way Northern Bangkok to the regional bus station.  A strange place, endless identical kiosks each specializing in a specific bus route.  It takes 3 or 4 staff to determine which booth we need but we quickly snag tickets for Pak Chong, with the next bus leaving in 5 minutes.  Luckily, we’re leaving our long haul gear in town as we have to run for it.  Successfully on board, the bus turns out to be perfectly acceptable and, it turns out, faster than the train.  Although this is not saying a lot, it does get us to our pick up point in time to join the afternoon tour.

We’re staying at the Greenleaf Guesthouse, another ultra cheap eco-stay place, where, strangely, most of the customers are retirees or families rather than backpackers.  This place makes its money through tours, it certainly won’t by charging $12/night for a double room.  We live the high life and pay $30 for a room with a warm shower and A/C.   A very quick turnaround and we’re in the back of a typical Thai tour truck (2 benches and a metal roof, open sides), heading towards the park. This half day tour is focused on bats, although first there is a dip in a pool fed by pristine spring water, which  bubbles  right out of the ground in front of us.

The second stop is a rural Buddhist temple that has a cave underneath where a small colony of well behaved bats, mostly Mexican free-tailed,  live.
If you’re quiet they don’t get agitated and the guano of these little guys is not a problem as it looks like tiny dusty diamonds and has no odor.  There are other inhabitants down there including an enormous, helicoptering beetle, elaborate arachnids and a somewhat tame tarantula called Fred.  Sometimes the monks go down there and meditate and as we come back up to the surface they are doing their evening chants as the sun starts to set.
With it being dusk, we have to race to get to the right location for the main event as, literally, two million bats emerge from their hillside cave home to forage for food.  It’s an amazing sight and sound as an endless ribbon of bats undulates across the sky, sometimes right on top of us, while hawks pick off stragglers.  Having never seen the bats in Austin or Carlsbad, New Mexico this is a very memorable event for us and, in any case, it would be very hard to beat this natural setting.  Back to the guesthouse for a fitful nights sleep on the world’s hardest bed.  Yes, they like firm mattresses in both Vietnam and Thailand but this feels like a wooden board.

Up early for round two, this time in the park proper.  More lengthy rides on wooden benches being bounced around on rough, winding roads.  If you eco tour in SE Asia you will come way with bruised buttocks.  Our tour guide this time is an enthusiastic young lady who is a killer animal spotter, sporting a high powered telescope with tripod, who can quickly pull off a phone photo through the lens of the contraption, which I find out later is not easy.

It’s late in the dry season so many of the trees have dropped their leaves, making animal spotting easier.  We “bag” gibbons and hornbills, which get our guide rather excited.  She’s less excited about the macaque monkeys and the various hoofed mammals, as they’re, apparently, ten a penny, but they’re still fun for us.  We also see large reptiles such as the water monitor and close up snakes such as pit vipers.  Yes, they’re poisonous just don’t touch them and they’ll snooze on.  Unfortunately, no elephants today, but we have a back up planned in Chiang Mai to cover that.  It’s been a long, hot, bumpy day and we still have to get back to Bangkok in order to fly out tomorrow lunchtime.  Two more Jeep rides, the (slow) train and another taxi to get back to our Airbnb – We are toast.

Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand is our next stop, join us there!