Khao Yai, Day Two

30 July 2012

Poor Chris has contracted a bad cold and has decided to stay home today. When you're sick on the trail you have to what you can to heal fast so travel doesn't become too difficult, and sadly that means sometimes you miss out on cool stuff. So its into the jungle on my own then...well, not really. I jump into the back of a pickup truck with an Austrian couple, a lovely pair from England, and a gorgeous blonde nurse and a marine from Holland. She looks just like Amanda Seyfried. Her name is Yonnicka and I cant get that Adam Sandler song out of my head. The pickup truck. Right, this is a very typical mode of transport in Thailand. It resembles a modern hayride in that the truck has bench seats bolted to its bed and a canvas canopy to keep you dry. But no seat belts, and only a few stainless steel bars to grab hold of while the driver whips around corners, glimpsing sheer jungle cliffs as you swing out over the side of the truck, following the g-force pull.

The guides are in the cab up to this point and now, with the car still rolling, one pops out and leaps up onto the back of the bed, standing and scouting for wildlife in the canopy. He is a skinny, good-looking Thai guy maybe 5'5" tall with a neatly gelled hair, designer jeans and a large silver belt buckle that says "50 Cent." Fifty is on the lookout for Gibbons. His first spot, as the truck lumbers along the forest service road, is a giant Forest Scorpion. I mean giant, the size of the palm of your hand. We all leap out of the truck to examine it, which he holds on his bare hand. "Isn't it very poisonous?" we all inquire. He insists it will remain calm as long as it's touching a warm surface, like human skin. He then places it on the marines bare bicep and numerous photos ensue. Our next stop is the ladies' which of course has a deadly poison apple green pit viper decorating the fence. Well who put that there? After we stop to check out an impossibly skinny long yellow snake that looks like a noodle come to life, I begin to wonder, did a truck ahead of us place this here for us to "find"? We spend a few minutes checking out a pair of large hornbill birds in a tree canopy through the telescope, and just as I'm wondering when we get to start hiking (enough with the truck already, I'm on a jungle trek not a safari in the 50s), we pull over on the side of the road and hop out. All of us receive two canvas booties and we're instructed to place them over our socks and pants like big tube socks, to keep out the leeches. Right, so where's the trail? We had passed another group who had embarked through the trees by a trailhead with a sign and everything. Fifty whips out his machete and starts working his way through the underbrush, we all look at each other with a silent knowing glance, we are in the hard core group. We're all reasonably fit and take to the jungle "trail" with the zest only fresh legs can express. Ten minutes later we are slogging through eight inch deep mud and most of us have fallen down once or twice.

A two and a half hour trek through dense jungle lies ahead of us. The sound of insects is sometimes deafening, but we can also hear monkeys, and they seem to be mapping our course. We come to a sort of valley, which is filled with thick red mud. I lose my balance in twelve inches of Thai mud and, for fear of falling face first into a pool of leeches and God knows what else, I reach against my better judgement for a swinging vine I see in my peripheral. It turns out to be a thick yellow vine populated by millions of inch-long spikes, which I delightedly discover are now lodged in my hand. When I finally reach a solid patch of vegetation I begin pulling out the spikes and readily I am still left with a handful of jungle shrapnel. Nothing to be done about it now, so onward I plunge, up a slick red hill, grabbing vines to help me get up without falling down and causing a domino effect on the English school teachers behind me, who quickly realized this isn't the pleasant trail hike they were hoping for. We pause after an hour and a half, streaked with mud and looking quite war-torn, for a packet of sticky rice wrapped neatly in banana leaf and held together by a sharp piece of bamboo. My hand is throbbing and swollen red. I distract myself by pulling twigs from my hair while the boys feed a leech to an angry mob of ants. Then we're off again, but this part of the trail is much easier. I think Fifty has given up on finding the gibbons, and we follow a proper hiking trail to the edge of the jungle. All of a sudden we're open savannah. The temperature has spiked by ten degrees and we walk through grass 3 feet high on either side, leaving a solid wall of evergreen jungle behind us. "Watch for tiger!" our guide enthusiastically warns us. Haha, I think as I nervously glance left to right.

We trek through the lovely tall grass, pale green and rustling in the wind, until we reach a deep red salt lick. There used to be a village here, Fifty tells us, and now the elephants come here to roll around in the dirt. No elephants are here now, but we hope to spot them later. We follow Fifty to a large teak observation tower where another trekking group is already having lunch. Each of us is handed a tupperware with rice and a kit of cabbage, carrots, onion and spinach in chicken stock. Up to the top of the tower for lunch and to enjoy the view. The savannah is large, all around us. The jungle we emerged from is visible in the distance and a mountain range beyond that. I feel like I'm in Africa. It's magical and I can't stop smiling. I am exploring the Thai jungle!

After lunch a few people are napping in hammocks set up by our guides, and most of us are lazing about. Our group is the muddiest by quite a measure, I guess the other groups stuck to the trail. Fifty, however, is still spotless except for small patches of red dirt on his boots. Yonnicka and I are dying for a wee, but there's no facilities and we're too scared of jungle creatures to venture out on our own. We hike for another 45 minutes - on a trail! - back to the truck.

On our way to the waterfall, our next stop, we see a family of Samba deer and a group of red butt baboons causing trouble by the side of the road. The king is eating a corn cob and smiling at us smugly. A smaller monkey rises up on his back legs, hoping we have some food for him. At the waterfall we are on our own. There's a bathroom - oh glory! Our truck takes a wander down to the base of the waterfall for a few minutes of wonder at the sheer force of the drop. The falls are not tall, but very wide and come crashing down to 90 centimeters of pool at the bottom, surging back up with almost as much force. There's no swimming here, and I can see why. The pool is rocking with waves and full of big boulders, and is very shallow. A few tourists die here every year jumping from the top without checking the depth at the bottom. The view is gorgeous. Vines draped romantically, moss and ivy clinging to the trees, and the silty waterfall misting us as we watch it's anger pounded on rocks in front of us.

Back at the truck we are rewarded with cokes, and there's another pit viper chillin' in the cafeteria on the fence. We get back in the truck and cruise the forest service roads for more wildlife. Our guides start talking excitedly in the cab, and the truck lurches into full speed ahead. We are all blinking our eyes against road dust and wind, hoping we make it to our destination alive, wherever that is. We are soaring over speed bumps as if they were flat, and now follow two other trucks going the same speed to the same place. Something is going on. I wonder what they've found. Five terrifying minutes later we are looking at a family of nine wild elephants sauntering lazily down the road.

The elephants are beautiful. Large, but not quite as big as regular zoo elephants. Jungle elephants are more compact for getting through the foliage. There are two females, one scrappy male in training (his tusks are just poking through and he's smaller than the females at three years old), and a group of younger baby elephants. There are several cars both behind the herd and in front, and all move slowly with the elephants so their movement is not impeded.

A few times a car zooms past the elephants from behind and scares one of the babies, causing it to trumpet in surprise. The overall effect is one of sadness at the lives forced upon these creatures. They are like celebrities who can't escape the menacing hold of the paparazzi, forced to live in a bizarre confinement. Every so often the male is pissed off by a car and makes to charge it, speeding up his gait and letting out a low, grumbling trumpet. Our own truck gets quite close to the elephants a few times and the male tried to charge us once and Fifty was, for the first time, visibly shaken by the wild. He takes elephants quite seriously and tells us a few stories about them charging cars, crushing the hoods, and even picking up motorbikes with their trunk. They are dangerous, unpredictable creatures. Though I would take one of these beauties over a pit viper if given a choice.

The excitement of the elephant sighting is the perfect end to our jungle trek, and the ride home is silent as we all contemplate the mark the jungle has left on each of us.