But when it comes to getting into a national park here in Thailand to do some hiking, it does make things a little more complicated.
The Greenleaf Tours and Guesthouse where we've been staying has been really great though. We asked about transportation into the park on our own, and they said that if we just wanted to hop in with one of the tour groups, that was fine provided there was room for us. No charge, because they were going that way anyhow!
So at 8:00am Saturday morning, we hopped in the back of a truck, and it was with the same people that we had done the afternoon tour with the day before... so we already knew them. We paid our own entrance fee into the park of 400 baht ($11.50 USD, $15.35 CAD) per person. A bit pricey, but the Thai national parks charge foreigners about ten times the amount they charge locals... the same way that the Tanzania parks do. And if we wanted to spend some more time in the park, then that is the price.
Stone park marker at the viewpoint.
We thought we were going to have to hitchhike from the park entrance all the way up to the trailhead, but they said they would drop us right there!
I had a route planned that was about 7.5 kms (4.7 miles). Part of it we had done a couple of days before while with the tour group.
Ruth on the trail, binoculars ready!
Our first wildlife sighting!
I wanted to play with the super macro zoom setting on the phone.
More wildlife! That's a big earthworm!
Butterfly.
But unfortunately, that was about all we saw. Still, we totally enjoyed the hike and just being off in the Thai jungle on our own without a guide was very cool. We had to laugh though... Ruth has been nervous about walking on some of the side roads here in Thailand because many of the stray dogs aren't very friendly. We've already had a couple of instances where we had to fight them off a bit. And yet she wants to hike in the jungle on our own with spiders and snakes and wild buffalo and porcupines and elephants and bears!
On the trail.
Shouldn't there be elephants taking a bath in this pond?
Apparently they stay in the shade during daylight hours.
Yes, this natural bridge is part of the trail.
Almost there!
Pretty fungus.
Big tree!
On the trail.
Ruth, at the base of a massive tree!
We made it to the visitors center at about noon, and sat and had some lunch. While we were sitting there, I spotted this motorhome that pulled in! So I went over and took a couple of photos.
It has Thai license plates.
Turns out it's made in Thailand.
Prices starting at 2 million baht ($57,400 USD, $76,700 CAD).
Might be something to look into in the future.
From the visitors center, we did another shorter walk that was about 1.5 kms.
Lots of monkeys on the suspension bridge.
We had no choice but to walk right by some of them.
This little one was hiding in the bush. Notice the mom with the baby.
Back at the visitors center, we decided we had had enough. So we went in to see if there were any transportation options available to take us back to the main gate where we could get a taxi. She explained that the only thing we could do was to hitchhike, but she said that somebody would definitely pick us up.
Being a Saturday, the park was quite busy so there was a fair bit of vehicle traffic around. We went and stood on the other side of the speed bump where cars had no choice but to slow down, and we stuck our thumbs out. Well, within three minutes a car stopped and picked us up! It turned out to be an Australian guy with his Thai girlfriend. Really nice couple, and they insisted on taking us all the way back to our guest house, which was about 30 kms (18 miles)!
Back at the guesthouse, we had some travel planning to do. We didn't have anything set up despite knowing that we had to be out the next morning. However, we did have some ideas. We had spoken to a Belgian couple who had headed east that morning to the city of Ubon Ratchathani (everybody simply calls it "Ubon") and we decided to follow them.
So we booked the train for Sunday morning!
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Those baby monkeys are adorable! I do understand Ruth's attitude. We had some issues with some really ornery stray dogs in Mexico that we had to throw rocks at to keep them from attacking us. I never felt as nervous doing jungle hikes in Belize, even knowing of some of the critters (a couple of very dangerous snakes, for example) that could lurk there, as I did a couple of times in Mexico dealing with stray dogs! I will say, though, most of the stray dogs we encountered were no problem; in fact, we ended up feeding a lot of them on our bike rides out in the rural area, but there were a few that were just nasty!
ReplyDeleteThose little monkeys were really sweet and I loved the ones that were still clinging to mom.
DeleteWe have come across so many stray dogs in Mexico, Turkiye, Morocco and more and almost always the dogs have never been a problem but here many of the stray dogs seem to be aggressive and yeah, it makes me nervous. Walking through the jungle really didn't bother me because most of the wildlife there doesn't want to encounter people so they generally stay out of the way and the odds of you seeing wildlife on the trail are pretty slim compared to meeting stray dogs out on the streets.