After a couple of days in Bangkok, I headed south on the overnight train to Khao Sok National Park in the south of Thailand. The park contains some of the oldest rainforest in the world, and is situated in an area with beautiful limestone karst formations, like those in Halong Bay, Vietnam or Guilin, China.
Like Sukhothai, the park, and the area around it, seemed completely deserted. The guidebooks say that this time of year is monsoon season on the west side of the Isthmus of Kra, but in reality, it rains everywhere in Thailand nearly every day, so the best way to tell what “season” it is is to count the number of tourists around. The morning after we arrived, I hiked one of the most popular trails and only saw a handful of people, although that was better than the amount of wildlife I saw. Although I heard rare gibbons calling to each other in the distance, my best sighting of the day was probably a millipede. I’m just glad that I didn’t see the leech whose bite I found later when I took off my shoes and socks.
A so-called “monkey temple” in the area offered a better chance for wildlife viewing, if you didn’t mind getting *really* close to a troop of long-tailed macaques. And by close, I mean several of them jumping on your shoulders at once with others tugging at your clothes if they thought you had any food for them. They were really entertaining to watch, and there were several mothers with infants, which of course were my favorite subjects for photos. The babies had such humanlike expressions, even if they did look a little bit like Yoda with their huge, pointed ears!
Long tailed macaques with infants. Click the images to view them larger.
After Khao Sok, it was time to head to the beach. Southern Thailand is famous for its gorgeous islands and beaches, and I was ready for another tanning session since my Vietnamese sunburn had finally faded.
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