The pair of shoes I brought that were supposed to last the whole trip and serve for town and trail are now the color of leech guts. I think I'll do some shopping when I get to Bangkok.
I left the weird little camp in Nong Khai on Monday morning not sure where I was going. I had a couple destinations to the south in mind and headed for the bus station armed with too little information and hoping for the best. I found a bus to Pak Chong, the jump-off point for Khao Yai National Park and grabbed that. Unfortunately, it was a local, second-class bus and took 10 uncomfortable hours. Plus the porter put me off in the wrong town a little north of Pak Chong. For awhile I had no idea where I was. I spent another hour wearing my backpack on the back of a motorbike at highway speeds before I got to the guest house.
I have to say, for any other travelers headed this way, I second the recommendation of the two guest houses mentioned by Lonely Planet here -- at least on the grounds of friendliness and helpfulness. The place I landed at didn't have enough guests for a tour the next day, and very generously steered me to the next hotel, even though it lowered their chances of eventually getting up enough for a tour. The owner also gave me a lift to the train station this morning.
The day-long trek in the park was incredible. It was a slow, quiet hike in the morning through jungle and hilltop grasslands, mostly on the look out for birds. Our guide was a genius at setting up his telescope in a hurry to give us a look, and he had a knack for working the controls on strange cameras to get pix through the telescope. We spotted long-tailed broadbills, great hornbills and wreathed hornbills (which make a tremenoundous whooshing sound when they're flapping their wings), macaques, a family of white-handed gibbons and tons of butterflys. I spotted one insect that our guide had never seen before, so I'm going to pretend I discovered it until I learn otherwise. I had a kind of pincers on the tail that grabbed at a stick when we prodded it. We played with a cottony-looking kind of caterpillar that can jump from its perch and float off in the wind.
And we saw leeches. So many that our guide was kind of freaking out. I had more of them on my shoes and ankles than I could count sometimes, and in places the ground was so thick with them it looked like beard stubble. (They stand on one end and wave the other end in the air looking for something to jump on.) I foolishly wore black pants, so I couldn't tell if they were getting above my leech socks or not. We got out the industrial strength DEET that I was carrying and did an experiment and determined that it helped, and I emptied my precious supply sharing it with the pair of Swedes I was with. They were built like Olympians and perfect in every other way, so I doubt leeches would bite them anyway.
The leech socks seemed kind of besides the point when we went looking for crocodiles. We spotted one, but only the bottom half of it. The other 5 feet were in the shade where we couldn't see it from our distance. We also spotted baby and adult monitor lizards, which looked tough enough to bully the crocodiles, and Indonesian water dragons.
After lunch we had a long rest at a gorgeous waterfall. Not safe for swimming, unfortunately. Then the rest of the day and early evening was spent driving around looking for wild elephants. They are common enough in the park that sightings are frequent, but we didn't have any luck. We did see guar, sambar deer and barking deer and more birds and primates.
It's a gorgeous park and was a privilege to see it. I would love to get deeper into it on an extended stay. I missed seeing the nightly exit of masses of pink-lipped bats, which would be in the tour on a second day.
My train leaves the tiny Pak Chong station for Ayattuya in a few minutes, and that should be my last major stop before a few days in Bangkok and flying back to Saigon.
-Robert
