Khao Sok National Park - Thailand
/India exhausted us to the bone. As you saw from our prior posts, we stayed no longer than two nights in any one location, and since India is such a large country we spent a lot of time in cars and planes. We decided to spend 12 nights in the same hotel in Thailand following India, doing nothing but sleeping, eating, and catching up on the blog. We stayed on Rawaii Beach on the Thai island of Phuket, which is a quiet spot, and enjoyed relaxing in a suite with a nice balcony. We went to the beach a few times, had lots of fun snorkeling, and got sunburned, but we didn't take a single picture. :) Some much needed R&R!
Recharged, we traveled by bus 3 hours north to the remote Khao Sok National Park, complete with an ancient rainforest, limestone cliffs, waterfalls and rare flora and fauna. The massive national park is half lake, half jungle, and we wanted to experience both.
Our first two nights Charles really wanted to stay in a treehouse in the jungle! It was totally awesome! You can see in the photos below that it's pretty nice (for a treehouse)! We don't have photos of the bathroom, but it was and outdoor bathroom attached to the bedroom. It was quite strange looking out the window and seeing the jungle far below, as well as showering with slugs creeping along the tree support beam and ceiling.
The next day we hired a guide from the hotel to take us on a jungle trek. I was nervous, because I'd read in a lot of blogs that bunches of leeches (EW LEECHES!!) often got on people and sucked their blood. I did get one leech, and it was super gross, but it could have been worse. We enjoyed hiking and swimming to cool down, and were delighted when a troop of monkeys started playing across the river from us.
The next day we left early to go for our overnight out on the lake portion of Khao Sok. We rode for an hour in the back of a pickup truck, then boarded a long boat to go out to the floating raft houses.
As soon as we landed at our cabin (A1!) we had a quick swim and then were off again with our guide to hike to a jungle cave. I didn't know what to expect, but I figured we would just sort of walk inside it and then leave. But the guide made it clear we should wear our swimsuits and not bring anything, because we were going to get wet! The cave ended up being a swim-through cave! At points, I could not touch the bottom and had to swim! At the end, the guide told us that a decent number of people have died from flash floods in the cave while hiking, but since it was not raining we were not in any danger. Unfortunately all of the videos I took in the cave didn't turn out, so we have no pictures and just a small snip of a video of that part of our trip.
We spent the night in our strange little house boat. The next day we boarded the boat again to check out another cave and finish up for the day. The scenery at Khao Sok was incredible. We also took a few videos from the boat, so we've included one below.
From there, we flew to Bangkok! More on the later.
To watch the video in a decent resolution, please go to the gear in the lower-right corner of the Youtube video and select 1080px or higher, otherwise it will look blurry!
