Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 May 2005 12:01:02
I'm still in Bangkok, after the bus we were supposed to catch had an accident.
Time for a better update then...
It was my birthday on the 12th (thank you for your birthday greetings, Sarah, Damien and Julie!). For my birthday we went to the Khao Yai National Park (which is where the waterfall part in "The Beach" was filmed). Khao Yai is also the only place in Thailand where tigers still live in the wild, so we set off to go and find some. Because public transport is not allowed into the park, we had to hitch hike our way in and ended up in a battered Toyota with a lovely Thai couple, unfortunately the car was so battered it kept threatening to break down (quite unnerving when there are signs outside saying "Caution - Tigers!").
After we finallly made it to the visitors centre, we went for a short trek through the jungle and fought against a horde of vicious leeches, we won the fight, but not without sustaining a leech bite each. After an hour of trekking, we discovered we had only covered one kilometer and so turned back to the visitors centre. After that we went on a night safari and saw a lot of deer (but still no tigers). The we had to hitch a ride out of the park with The Most Passive Aggresive Woman In The World and her cohorts... This woman spoke very good english but claimed not to be able to understand what we were telling her, this proved to be quite traumatic as in the dark we couldn't find our guest house, we eventually asked her to drop us by the road side near to where we thought our guesthouse was. We set off walking back up the road, got chased by a doberman, and eventually managed to find some Thais who took us back to the guesthouse for free! all in all: The Best Birthday Ever!