Mountains, Jungles and Forests

Phetburi and the National Parks

Friday after school I set off for Nakhon Pathom and from there grabbed a bus south to the town of Phetburi. After a 2 hour ride, we reached the bus station which naturally wasn't even remotely close to the city. I had no map, so I wandered the streets aimlessly for the next few hours searching for some form of faraang-friendly district. But besides a cave and the usual assortment of wats, the town seemed to have little to offer the average tourist and didn't make much of an effort to provide lodging or direction or anything of the slightest use to me.

The one guesthouse that thought to use any sort of English advertising had one room left for $3 – this had the look of a dilapidated farm house with several floorboards missing and others which bowed deeply under my weight; additionally, no one had bothered putting glass or shutters on the windows and all the noise from the road outside flowed right in. I searched desperately for another option, asking every street vendor and taxi driver in the area, but could only find directions to the place I had left minutes before.

After a few hours of practically sleeping, I set out to find a rental motorbike; the owner of the guesthouse had an extra one lying around and agreed to let me take it for $6/day (about twice the price of Chiang Mai); unfortunately, the only helmet he had on hand didn't fit my head, and a nearby helmet store, despite its extensive inventory, didn't stock anything to accommodate my freakish proportions. I had just about given up the whole motorcycle idea and was searching for a bus to run me out to the park when I came across a Suzuki dealership. They offered a bike for the same price and completed all the paperwork before concluding that they too, did not have a single helmet, among the hundreds they had on hand, to fit me; fortunately, one of the employees knew of a nearby village populated by a big-headed tribe, and in half an hour, I had something that seemed as if it would do the trick. Unfortunately, after riding about 10km from the store, I found that my head had expanded and the helmet would no longer fit; I had never known my skull to grow at such a rapid pace before, but this would bring about a fair bit of discomfort over the next few days.

The first stop was a palace high atop a hill that could (supposedly) only be accessed by a pricey cable car. There was nothing terribly exciting about the place, but it did have decent views of the city. A stray dog decided he would follow me wherever I went and quite often cornered me at the top of monuments and in narrow tunnels; he was a serious nuisance, but it was still a bit sad to see him try to chase the cable car down the mountain.

Leaving the city, I set off to the east to visit the beaches of Cha-am and Hua Hin, but the curvy roads rapidly triumphed over my internal compass and I soon found that I was headed due west towards Kaeng Krachen National Park. Upon entering the park, I crossed over a dam that formed a spectacular, mist-shrouded lake dotted with hundreds of limestone peaks.

When I reached the visitor's center, I was informed that motorcycles weren't allowed in the park but that they would gladly rent me a car right then and there for an elevated price. I opted instead to go to the nearby Pala-U waterfall - this was not the most accessible attraction I've come across; after 30km of paved road potmarked with deadly wild elephant mounds and frequented by swarms of suicidal butterflies, I slipped and slid over 3km of muddy track to get to the entrance. There were apparently 11 tiers to this waterfall, but since the trail was nothing more than a continuous scramble over algae-covered boulders with precipitous drop-offs into the roaring rapids, I only made it to number three.

From here, it was a long bike out of the mountains and down the highway to the town of Pranburi. The rain was oddly absent on this particular weekend but there was no lack of danger; unlike the roads to the north, these had frequent potholes – and these were not your typical little annoyances, but gaping pits that could swallow a motorbike whole – there was also the small matter of the 40kph winds that threatened to fling me into the trees or in front of a mac truck. Additionally, I came across one “super-canine" stray; I had always been under the impression that I could outrun most dogs, and on a bike I felt nearly invincible, but on this particular night, these assumptions went out the window as I clocked a dog (knee-height, not one of those horse look-a-likes) running at 50kph – fortunately, he opted to simply race beside me and didn't go for the intercept.

I had read somewhere that Kuiburi National Park was packed with elephants, gibbons, leopards and various other exotic beasts, and a midnight tour of the salt licks was offered to try to spot them. So from Pranburi, I rode south through the darkness with the intent of arriving at the park in time for this viewing. However, over the course of the next 50km, I had some time to think over the notion of venturing into the wilds in the middle of the night in search of man-eating critters, and eventually decided to stay in the nearby city of Kuiburi. This town didn't have any English-labeled guesthouses but by asking random shop owners around town I eventually managed a motorcycle escort to a place that didn't really live up to its $4.50 price tag, but did provide some degree of assurance against being eaten by a tiger or a horde of crazed barking deer.

First thing in the morning I ran out to the park, woke up the staff and demanded that they show me elephants. Unfortunately, they informed me that there would be no elephants handy until 4 in the afternoon, and furthermore, the park had nothing else on offer besides a few puny waterfalls: I had effectively ridden an hour out of my way for nothing.

Returning to the main road, it was just a few more kilometers to Thailand's first maritime park, Sam Roi Yot. Here, there were hundreds of cliffs rising out of the coastal plain. After an arduous hike to a quarter-mile-high lookout, I climbed up another rocky slope to the entrance to Sai Cave. Here, a sign announced that the rooms beyond were too dangerous to explore without a guide and lantern; since these had apparently gone to lunch, I loaded my torch with a new set of batteries and marched into the darkness. There wasn't much in the way of guidance, so I have no idea how much of the cave I actually saw, but I did come across plenty of bats and wetas, and I found a fairly substantial pile of money (which I assumed was cursed or booby-trapped).

Kaew Cave was next; here they had actually gone to the trouble of providing arrows that indicated what path to follow, but it was a difficult scramble up rocky ladders, through knee-high cracks, and along narrow ledges that dropped sharply into an endless abyss; anywhere in the civilized world, this sort of cave would have required a guide, rappelling gear and a 3-page waiver.

Leaving the park, it was a quick jaunt up the coast to the beach town of Hua Hin; this had enough faraang-oriented marketing to more than compensate for the lack of western tourism in the previous towns. The beach was exactly like every other beach in the world except for the hordes of obnoxious horse-rental guys and an endless string of vendors hawking such favorites as baked beans on toast and french fries with mayonnaise.

Cha-am beach was much the same and so I hurried on towards Phetburi. I took a long string of back-country roads and came across such interesting road-side attractions as a giant pineapple and a wat built on top of a huge, land-locked boat. I returned the bike (in one piece this time around) and got a ride out to the bus station; it turned out that the evening's last bus for Nakhon Pathom had left half an hour earlier so I was forced to take the new route into Bangkok. About 2 hours into the trip, I woke up just as we passed through the Phetkasem Road intersection where I needed to catch another bus; this, however, was some sort of express service and half an hour later, we reached the southern bus station (several miles north of the city); an hour after that, I was in a local bus in the same spot on Phetkasem. I was home before 11, but a block-party showing of Batman Begins (in Thai) shook the walls of my apartment til 1, and I was thrilled as usual to get up at 7 and go in to face a room full of screaming 10 year-olds.

These monkeys in downtown Phetburi were sadly the most wildlife I saw on this trip