Pak Chong & Khao Yai

Monday, September 18, 2006
Pak Chong & Khao Yai Category: Travel and Places
I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in Pak Chong. This happens to be one of the all-too-rare ice-cream cafes, so I figured I had better indulge in something sweet and refreshing while I was here. I looked at the menu, which was written in Thai, and found a picture of a vanilla milk shake. I pointed to the picture and said, "Vanilla Shake?" She responded with, "Banana Shake?" "No" I replied, "Vanilla." OK. OK. Lots of smiles back and forth and it seems we are understanding each other. Sure enough a couple of minutes she hands me a delicious looking vanilla shake. Mmmmm. I continue to work (I'm downloading the pictures from my camera and it is taking a while since this computer is running on Windows 98) and after a minute she brings me over a banana milkshake too. I begin by trying to explain that I only wanted the vanilla milkshake, but quickly give up and say we'll take it anyway. Now Ryan gets to enjoy the punishment for my miscommunication. Not bad.
Yesterday we went to a national park east of Bangkok. This is a completely new area for me. We had talked about going to Chang Mai, but decided in the end that there was little reason to make the 13 hour journey if all we wanted to see was some animals in the jungle. So, we opted for a shorter trip out east and I'm glad we did because there seems to be very few tourists here. We hired a guide from the Green Leaf hotel to take us into the wilderness. He proved to be very helpful, finding us all kinds of animals. We saw gibbons, monitor lizards, porcupines, a toucan-ish bird called the horn-bill, and even a good sized python! We spend the morning walking through the trees looking for critters. I was feeling quite lucky to have a sunny day after so many days of rain. But the sun was short-lived and by mid-morning we could see the clouds rolling in. At one point we saw a flash (I thought that the French couple behind us had taken a picture) and then the light was followed by a massive CRACKing thunder! We all jumped and looked around to see what tree had been electrocuted. The forest seemed to be fine and we used the unexpected stop to pull out our rain coats in time for the downpour that followed. The rain only lasted about an hour, but we managed to get our shoes soaked (they are still drying today). The rain also gave the leeches an unfair advantage. I killed more than a few that had made their way onto my socks, shoes and pants. A couple resourceful leeches made their way onto my skin, I found one on my inner arm when we reached the look-out hut. He'd been happily sucking my blood for a while and left a little bruise with a round puncture wound in the middle. Ry came through unscathed, only one managed to reach his skin and he got rid of it before it could latch on.