Khao Sok

When I arrived in Thailand, I had a hotel reservation only in Koh Samui, and I had only a few vague ideas of where I would go after having my fill of the island. My travel plans changed daily as I read through my guidebook. Krabi, Phuket, Rangon, and Prachuap were each tentatively planned as my next stop before I read about Khao Sok, a national park said to contain a rainforest that is older than the Amazon (and, according to the park website, “the oldest evergreen rainforest in the world”). So, about 20 hours before I had to leave Koh Samui, I bought a ticket for a ferry across the Gulf of Thailand to the mainland and a bus ride from the coast to the national park.

I arrived at a dirt road on the edge of the park six hours after leaving Koh Samui. A man waiting for travelers offered me a ride in the back of his truck from the bus stop to my guesthouse. After I checked into my room – a small, rustic bungalow with two beds, each covered by a mosquito net mounted to the ceiling – I made a reservation to join a 10 hour day tour that included a boat ride across Cheow Larn lake (the result of damming the Pasaeng River), hiking in the jungle, and spelunking in Namtaloo cave.

The tour cost about 40 euros. The hour boat ride from the main docking area to the raft houses, where travelers who choose a longer tour option sleep overnight, was worth the price of admission alone. The beauty of the jagged cliffs that rose from the teal waters was, as my guidebook suggested, supernatural. When we arrived at the raft houses, I immediately regretted passing up the overnight trip in favor of the day tour. Cheow Lake was already the highlight of my three weeks in Thailand, but I wish I could have slept inside one of the bamboo huts on top the water under the clear, star-saturated sky, and woken up at dawn to the chattering and buzzing of the jungle fauna.    

After an hour break at the raft houses when others swam in the lake and I explored the slopes of the surrounding hills and took some pictures, the subset of the travelers willing to hike through a pitch black cave with neck high waters boarded a boat to dock at the trail heading toward the cave. Our guides gave each of us a head lamp, which first came in handy on the uneven, slippery ground, and then allowed us to see hundreds of bats taciturnly hanging from the ceiling, a spider the size of my face sitting resting on a rock, and water spilling over alien rock formations that glittered like diamonds in the light.

The hour boat ride back to the docking area was even more spectacular than the morning ride was. The sun was low enough in the sky to produce noticeable beams of light above the cliffs and glowing auras behind them, and the water shifted from a cloudy teal to a reflective turquoise.

For my next (and last) day in Khao Sok, I took a short hike alone through the jungle from a trailhead not far from the guesthouse. I saw some others on the trail, including some small groups with Thai guides who identified animal tracks on the ground and named birds, butterflies, and trees near the trail. When I was close to one of these groups, the guide pointed out the loud (and obvious) activity of primates shouting and bending tree limbs in the canopy a hundred feet above the ground. Other than a large golden orb spider lounging in its human-sized web, I didn't see anyone on the trail for an hour after this.

About thirty minutes after turning around to head back to the trailhead, I followed a bend in the trail on the way back, and I found myself less than 20 feet from a group of four primates sitting on a two by four foot park information board. One was much larger than the others, and I assumed it was the mother of the three smaller ones. I froze when I saw them, and the large one stared at me while the smaller ones continued to scurry around on the ground. I avoided eye contact and walked slowly along the edge of the trail, as far away from them as I could. When I was ten feet past them, I slowly glanced over my shoulder and saw that they had barely acknowledged my presence as I passed (or, at least were acting the exact same as they had before I’d passed them). Satisfied that I was in no danger of having my face ripped off, I knelt down and removed my camera and watched them play for five minutes before they scampered into the jungle after hearing a loud group of hikers approaching from behind.

My last adventure in Khao Sok occurred in my shower. As I took my last shower before getting on a bus to Bangkok, I noticed what seemed like a large blister on the inside of my left foot. I was surprised – I’d been walking all morning in my running shoes and a pair of high cut athletic socks, and I hadn’t felt any discomfort. When I rubbed it, I felt no pain, but what seemed like a bloody piece of skin fell from my foot onto the bathroom floor. When I examined the piece of skin on the ground, I saw it transform from red to black as it was rinsed by the water. I looked back at my foot, and blood began flowing quickly from the blister. It was a rather painless, fascinating first experience with a leach. I was amazed that it had been able to get under (or through) my sock and so deep into my shoe, even though I never touched water on the hike. On the whole, it was a welcome alternative to blood loss via mosquito bite. 

Koh Samui

In my year and a half working in Amsterdam, I've been pressured to take more vacation by friends and (gently) by my employers. Although I've had the good fortune to travel to Germany twice, Belgium four times, France twice, and the U.S. twice, all of these trips have been for work or for three or four day weekends. Although this amount of travel and vacation has seemed acceptable to me, I am apparently in an "American" mindset when it comes to vacation. In the U.S., the standard is 10 paid holiday days per year; in the Netherlands, it is 20.

In September, I decided to take my colleague's advice by taking a little vacation around Christmas. I wanted to escape from the Dutch winter gloom to somewhere sunny and, preferably, a little warm. My first thought was the Canary Islands, but I wasn't impressed by the results of the web research I did on them. I somehow settled on Laos, probably based on some online travel article I read on the beauty of Luang Prabang. After researching flight prices for a few weeks, I settled on departing from Amsterdam to Bangkok on December 31st, and returning from Bangkok on January 21st. 

After more research on getting from Bangkok to Luang Prabang once I was in Southeast Asia - and more reading on Bangkok and Thailand - I decided that my time would be best spent staying in Thailand rather than negotiating the slow journey from Bangkok to Luang Prabang. And, after further consultation with friends who have been to Thailand multiple times, I decided to recover from jet lag in Koh Samui, a beach resort island in the Gulf of Thailand. So, immediately after my 12 hour flight, I booked a one way ticket from Bangkok to Koh Samui.

Koh Samui is the largest island in the Samui Archipelago, which is an hour flight south of Bangkok, and about 20 miles east of the thin strand of Thailand that borders the Andaman Sea (which is, as best as I can tell, the Indian Ocean) on the west and the Gulf of Thailand on the east. It used to be primarily an agricultural and foraging community (coconut harvesting, fishing), but the money of wealthy Western tourists has transformed the coastal perimeter into a destination for (mostly) lounging on the beach and eating, getting "dates" with Thai women, and drinking (naturally, these are not mutually exclusive activities).

I spent five days on Koh Samui. Retrospectively, this is a bit too much time for someone with my taste in vacation activities. Much of the crowd felt younger (or, at least, more into drinking and dancing) or older, and I found the tourist resort nature of the island a bit off-putting. Also, although cheap by Western standards, the island is one of the more expensive places in Thailand.

This isn't to say that I failed to enjoy myself on Koh Samui. On the contrary, I indulged in Thai massages in open walled bungalows only meters from the beach with the sound of the ocean drowning out the chatter of the beach goers on the sand. I ate in beach side restaurants, alternating between reading a book and simply staring out into the sea. I joined a day tour of the island, where a van full of people were shuttled around to a variety of sites, including the "Big Buddha" (a 40 foot high statue overlooking a cliff), a jungle park in the middle of the island where I took a quick, hour long solo hike to the top of a waterfall, and a "monkey show," where a man demonstrates how a trained monkey climbs coconut trees to retrieve coconuts.

I also took a day trip to Ang Thong Marine Park, a largely undeveloped and uninhabited array of 40+ islands west of Koh Samui. The hour long boat ride across the teal waters was alone worth the price of the tour. But the real treat came when the large boats that transported the tour group docked a few hundred feet from one of the largest islands, and we took smaller motor boats to the sandy shore. At this point, all ~200 people on the tour had the option to do whatever they wished - swim, snorkel, kayak, drink beer, or hike to a lookout point high on the island. As much as I do enjoy beer (though my affection is tempered when the beer comes from Southeast Asia), I took the hiking option.

The trek up the trail was substantially more difficult than I had expected. It was one of the steeper trails I've hiked, and I was grateful for the thick, taught rope that ran alongside the path and saved me from falling down or off the trail several times. It was also the slipperiest trail I've ever hiked, with runny mud surrounding smooth, slick slabs of rock. After a little less than an hour of hiking - and some pretty profuse sweating in the hot and humid tropical air - I made it to the summit and took in a glorious panoramic view of the tail below, the boats in the water, and the other surrounding islands.

I'd spend another day on Koh Samui relaxing and recovering from the swimming and hiking of the trip to the marine park before departing for my next destination: Khao Sok.