Into the rainforests of Thailand: from the bad to the good

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The Resort

We left Brown House thus, never to return again and headed off to a resort in the middle of nowhere to relax for one night before the group was split up to go its seperate ways. We arrive at this beautiful golf resort (though about 10x smaller than western golf resorts), checked into beautiful air-conditioned rooms with televisions and big beds and got ourselves all prepared to enjoy some afternoon activities! Charlee and I decided to head straight down to the pool however, we got slightly distracted by the mini spa so we decided to have an hour-long thai massage instead, which was so good. Unlike western massages, it is like a full body work out as you are constantly being stretched into all sorts of strange positions!! It was then time to go for dinner but when two of the girls started bragging that they had ordered in pizza, lots of others wanted to join in on the action. However, 30 minutes later the pizza company called back and despite lots of begging and offering to give them more money, we were unfortuantly too far away for delivery. A small group of us then just sat around for several hours so as to watch the Man U vs. Wigan match, but depsite being the last match of the season was incredibly dull so we headed off to bed soon afterwards to prepare for the following day and our journey to Phu Toei National park for some trekking.

Will it ever stop raining?!?!

We got to have a nice lie in the following morning but soon afterwards it was time to say goodbye to our teaching fellows and pile into the buses that were to take us to Phu Toei national park. Only problem being that it was tipping it down and we were in an open-backed bus where many of the windows did not close. Hmmmm. So we had to sit there for the majority of the journey with our waterproofs on. Not a good start. We eventually arrived at our first destination which was a little camp at the beginning on the national park and we quickly unloaded the trucks. Next came the fun part. It so happens that Greenway/Oliver just piled a load of tents onto the trucks and none of them were checked before we arrived at our destination. Sophie (also known as Aophie due to a mistake on Greenways volunteer form) and I went through a good three tents before having to mix and match inners/outers/poles from different tents to make a fully working tent. Other people just had to cram more people into their tents. Disaster number 1!

We then spent the night under this shelter with nothing to but drink beer and play cards and stay out of the rain! The next morning I was very grumpy due to the fact I'd slept on a hard floor (something I would grow use to) and being woken up at 6.45am by a very loud girl in our group when breakfast was not until 8am. After breakfast, we took down our tents, wrapped all our big bags up in the outers of our tents to protect them from the rain (it was still pouring it down and all our stuff was being driven to the next camp in an open top truck) and we climbed onto the back of what can only be called a pick-up truck with a open-top cage around it. We thus stood up on this and were almost blown away by the wind as we drove to the starting point for our trail to base camp.

The walk lasted for about 5/6 hours and was a really enjoyable walk due to its lack of hard parts. However, that was once I had gotton past the first section: downhill to a river. I was at the front of the queue behind Joe, our leader and he just walked straight through the river. So I asked him how I was supposed to do that without getting water in my very expensive shoes. I wasnt. Basically we had in total about 25 river crossings in that walk and everyone was squelching in their shoes after the first few. Pleasant. We also started the walk off in very dense jungle which Joe had to hack his way through before entering into very open primary rainforest. We stopped for lunch by this beautiful waterfall which the boys all went into before finding out we had to climb that very waterfall after lunch. A lot of fun but very slippery. After this the walk again was easy until we reached the last section: a very steep uphill section. It also did not help that due to the rain, the muddy ground was horribly slippery. Oh well, we eventually made it up to the top and to base camp where we were allowed to set up camp inside again due to the heavy rain, which made me more happy than I can describe. Aophie and I had more joy setting up our tent when some of the poles broke and we had to take more apart and stick them together: disaster number 2.

The next day we got to go caving, something I had never done before. The first cave we reached involved some minor ducking but inside was so beautiful; a huge cavern completely pitch black save for our torches. We were not in there long though due to there being no other way out. Our second cave experience was by far the best. For the first one we had to climb up a rockface to enter, but this one we climbed down into the bottom of a mountain and kept going deeper and deeper. Inside, again it was pitch black but there were some beautiful stalactites that glistened like millions of little crystals when our torches flashed on them. We kept on going through as Joe had found another way out, however it involved taking off our backpacks and lying flat on our stomachs, wriggling through a gap we could not even go on our hands and knees through. Luckily it was all for about 30 secondss but we had several members of the group with claustrophobia and fears of being underground so it was a very traumatic experience for some. Before exiting, some of us went deeper into the mountains until we reached a tiny room where we could only just about sit up so we turned around and left. The third and final cave was again completely different to the other two as it was an open cave set into the base of a mountain with lots of rocks to climb up and over: like an adults playground. It was then time to head back to camp where I chilled out for the rest of the day as the afternoon hike involved a 1,000m hillclimb to the top of a mountain to see the view and then come back down again. Now as much as I love hiking, I have done all that before. Plus I was very tired due to the lack of sleep from sleeping on a hard woodern floor that bounces whenever anyone walked across it!!

And so, we come to the infamous evening that was soon to become Disaster number 3. Like the evening before, after dinner we all sat around a campfire (set up inside) and had a few drinks when we were suddenly invaded by a large group of Thai guys who had been sat outside in the campgrounds having a BBQ when it had started to rain.So we were more than happy for them to come inside out of the rain and eat. However, after that Whisky got involved and the thai guys as well as some of our own got very drunk. Including Oliver, our co-ordinator. We than had a mini accident when Katie, one of our girls, fell through one of the woodern floor planks on the way to the bathroom and badly hurt her toenail and foot. Oliver, we then found out, has no first aid training and he was trying to mend Katies foot whilst he was drunk. Luckily Suzie and I have some first aid so after finally convincing Oliver to leave Katie alone as he was hurting her, we sorted out her foot. By this point I was not happy with Oliver at all. By 11pm, we all started heading for bed as we had trekking again the next day. The thai guys however were still drinking and they were drinking right outside our tents. So a small group of us, granted led by me, pulled Oliver to one side and asked when they would be leaving. His response was about 1/2am. Saying we were not happy with this, we asked if he could get them to move elsewhere because we did not feel safe sleeping with random drunken men outside our tents. However, he did not seem to understand our reasoning and when we told him we were not happy, he just flipped. He started screaming yelling"go to bed, go to bed" whilst switching all the lights off and just kept ranting and raving. Aophie and I ran to the toilets and hid there whilst apparantly several of the Thai men had to calm Oliver down. He eventually stopped shouting and Harry,one of our boys escorted us to our tent where we slept with a lock on the zip, but luckily most of the thai guys had either gone or moved outside. The boys were also sweet enough to patrol the tents for several hours after we'd gone to bed which was unbelievably nice of them. All in all though not a good night.

So the next morning, after a horrendous nights sleep, I headed out on the morning walk, purely because I wanted to be as far away from Oliver as possible.The walk was pretty pointless and involved walking down a large hill for about 45 minutes which we knew we would have to walk back up again. I quite enjoyed the walk back though as I just listened to my mp3player and it helped me to calm down from the night before. Though there was a period when I was walking along the flat back to camp where I hadn't seen anyone for 20 minutes and started scarying myself when the Jurrasic park theme tune came on my mp3, thinking some velosoraptur or something was going to jump out at me!! I eventually found people though and we ventured back to camp getting slightly lost along the way. The afternoon was another chill out with Joe taking us to what he had called a pool which turned out to be a natural one but not feeling like a swim I headed back to camp, where I got to shower in a room with only 3 walls so you got to look over the beautiful forest and in which the shower consisted of a tap. Definatly back to basics. The last night was a much calmer night than before and everyone soon headed off to bed to prepare for leaving the next day. Naturally, Oliver was no where to be seen.

The following day we woke up and packed all our stuff up, which was a hard affair and with which Aophie so epically quoted: "ugh life is so hard.......ooooo Chanel" when she discovered her Chanel perfume in her bag. We then had to climb onto the back of yet more trucks, though this time with no sides and had to trave lfor 15 mins to a change over point where we got backi nto the cage trucks we had arrived on. The whole way one of the dogs at camp, who we had so lovingly called Josephine, followed the trucks the entire way until we reached the main road. Very cute!!! With an hour long journey ahead of us, Aophie, Holly and I sang at the top of our voices the entire way and were occassionaly joined by two of the boys though the other two only looked marginly impressed!! We then arrived at the most beautiful setting we have seen since we have been here in Thailand. It was a lake formed by a dam and by where we were staying there was a bar and a covered woodern platform extending out over the lake with a huge sound system that we could connect our iPods to. As such, we spent the entire day floating around the lake in tubes, dancing and drinking the night away. By far the best night we have had on the trip so far and the sunset over the lake was breathtaking.

The next day, after a lazy start we headed back to the buses and drove all the way back to Suphanburi, the town we had visited several times previously to visit the Tesco Lotus there. Once back, we had a day that consisted of doing very little including sleeping, swimming, shopping etc before heading off to bed, ready for the following day when it would time to leave the mainland and head to the little island of Koh Samet.

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Photos

The strength of a crab
Joe showing us that a crab could hold his heavy machete with one claw

And you think I'm messy!
The state of our camp on the morning that we left