Khao Sok National Park

I decided on a two day trek with an overnight stay in a raft house. The raft houses are a bit shambolic, and some germans at the bus station warned us they found a snake in their hut, so we all started worrying what we were in for. In the end it was ok, I only had to deal with a frog coming inside during the night. The first day we did a jungle trek to a cave which involved wading through a river, and then continuing through the jungle to a large cave that takes about an hour to walk through. There is a river running through the cave, and some of the narrower sections can be quite deep. I was aware that six tourists and their two guides had died in the cave a couple of years ago when the river flooded, and there was also warning sign that the river is prone to flash flooding. For the whole morning it had been extremely overcast so I decided to wait outside, and two of the others in our group did the same while the rest went through. They made it out ok, and I'm sure I would have been fine too, but I wasn't feeling ready to die for the experience.

Khao sok is quite a beautiful park, but theeming with wildlife it aint, or at least in the parts we were taken to. This wasn't helped by the guides strategy of taking us around in noisy longtail boats to go looking for animals. A dutch guy who had been in National Parks all over Africa and Central America agreed it was a crazy idea, we should been in canoes or paddle boats. We did see a couple of monkeys, but that was nothing special, we were hoping for hornbills, civet cats or sunbears. The last day we did another jungle trek to a stunning viewpoint high above the lake. It was very impressive, I have the photos on my SLR along with some other good ones that I'm afraid to load onto the computers here for fear of getting a virus on my memory card. I wont be able to post these until I get a backup device in the mail shortly.