A Bungalow Princess

Asia » Thailand » South-West Thailand » Surat Thani
July 30th 2006

Published: July 30th 2006

These past few days have been incredible!! I left Chiang Mai on Wednesday morning, slept in Bangkok Wednesday night, and then flew to Surat Thani on Thursday morning. In a valiant attempt to regain my penny-pinching traveller ways, I have been very good with money since I left Chiang Mai. I think I can consider Chiang Mai my "bingeing" and for the rest of the trip I will be thrifty. It started with not taking a taxi or tuktuk from the airport to my hotel in Bangkok for 300B, but taking the train and walking from the train station (a total of 10B - yes!). Then I stayed in a dorm-like hostel in Chinatown for 160B as opposed to the hotel I had booked that would have been 500B. I was very proud of myself.

After arriving in Surat Thani and battling the hordes of tuktuk drivers and travel agency representatives on the street trying to con me into paying them far more than their services are worth, I found a very nice lady who ran a guesthouse and she was so helpful (a big relief) and told me how I could get to the Khao Sok National Park on a public bus for 75B (when most of the travel agencies had been quoting 500B or more). Happy I was again. I was so looking forward to getting away from crowded cities to somewhere peaceful... everything I had read about Khao Sok convinced me that it was the place to be. Covered by the most ancient rainforest in the world, with huge limestone mountains shooting straight up in the air, misty mornings and firefly-filled evenings and no electricity... it was excellent.

The little girl in me was inspired and excited by my accomodation -- almost a treehouse! A little bamboo bungalow way up high on stilts only big enough for me. There was a little balcony with a bench where I could sit with my legs dangling high above the palms and rambutin trees and watch the sunrise, the sunset, the moonrise, the stars appear, and the fireflies continue all night long. There was a mosquito net, which sounds very crude, but I imagined that it was like one of those princess beds that they sell in Ikea that I always dreamed about having when I was little -- the ones with the pink and white lacy curtains coming down around the bed to make a cosy little cocoon just for me. I loved to look down between the slats of wood to see the ground far below and to fall asleep to the sounds of the rainforest all around me. On my last night there I was too tired to walk anywhere, and there was not enough light left for me to read, but it was too early to go to bed -- only 7pm! So I decided to watch it get dark. It was a great experience... I have never been patient enough before to watch the darkness approach. It was hard to discern... sometimes I would be watching and watching and nothing would change, but then I would look down at the fireflies for a minute or up to check how many stars there were, and when I looked back to the horizon again it seemed to have drastically changed! I'm not sure how long it took for the darkness to blanket everything because I had taken off my watch for the time there, but when I went into bed that night I was very happy.

I woke up early in the mornings to start hiking. When I started the first day, I went first to the Visitor Centre and absorbed all the material I could. After I had memorized most of the exhibits about the trail I planned to follow and all possible plants and wildlife species I might see, I set out walking, the information running through my head.

The beginning of the trail was flat and wide and the rainforest was not too thick. It reminded me of walking in the ravine at home, with a few palms and banana trees to spice things up! As I continued and the trail started to twist, there were roots jutting up and huge trees everywhere and my mind moved more to the West Coast Trail. There were occasional ladders and lots of very wet areas. Then the deeper into the rainforest I got, the less familiar and the more fairy-tale-like everything felt! I made up all sorts of stories about myself, the Bungalow Princess, lost in the rainforest and living high in the trees with the monkeys, never again to see my lovely bungalow palace.

I didn't take any pictures, because pictures would not have done this incredible place justice at all. Just look in your nearest biology textbook at the Plant Life chapter and those pictures show exactly what it was like. The stereotypes are true! Everything I have ever heard or learned (or even imagined) about the rainforest was brought to fruition (As a side note, in my bathroom one night I saw one of those bright green frogs that I think was on the cover of my grade 10 biology textbook... or was it grade 11? Anyways, I couldn't remember whether it was dangerous at all or not so I left it alone and crawled back under my mosquito net, hoping it would work as a frog net as well).

As I was hiking along at one point I saw a very, very large snake skin. Luckily there was no snake in sight, but just imagining what kind of creature would have shed a skin like that was enough to send shivers up my spine.

Since it is the rainy season, there were lots of warnings in the Visitors' Centre about which waterfalls to avoid and which trails were dangerous because of possible mudslides. I carefully chose my route to avoid these dangerous places, but at one point the trail led into a river. I could see the continuation of the trail on the other side and since the river didn't look very deep I imagined that it probably was not usually a river, maybe just a little stream with rocks where you could cross. A little further upstream I saw some widely spaced rocks that could possibly be used as stepping stones if they weren't slippery at all and if I could walk across them with incredible balance and grace. Hmm...was that really possible? Rocks in the middle of a river not slippery? And me -- balance and grace??

But it was my only option so I took a deep breath and stepped onto the first stone with my left foot. My right foot found the next closest stone and I stood there for a second, trying to balance my body and calm my mind. I couldn't help but remember what I had read that morning about flood waters "do not attempt to walk through the waters -- six inches of water is enough to knock you off your feet and two feet of water is enough to sweep away a car." The water was about six inches deep. As I stood there for ages trying to decide whether it was possible for my right foot to support me as I moved my lead-heavy left foot to the next stone, and simultaneously trying to calm my mind and stop the trivia facts from running through it... an insect buzzed by me and I toppled into the water.

Feeling rather foolish, I stood and walked easily to the other side of the river. Of course, these weren't flood waters, it was a river, and it wasn't deep. I should have just done that in the first place. Anyways, now my boots were full of water so I stopped to take them off and wring the water out of my socks (highly reminiscent of the West Coast Trail the day we were boulder-hopping and I so gracefully fell into the ocean) and happily squished on. Now that I was already wet, I was not afraid to walk through the boggy mud and get dirty, and any further stream-crossings were confidently executed by walking straight through 😊

When it started to rain (as it often does in the rainforest -- it pours about once every 2 hours and the rest of the time is a gentle patter) I got even more soaked. This warm wetness was, I think, what led me to be a prime target for leeches. When I sat down on a little stone by the side of the river only about 1 km away from my destination to have a snack, I noticed a leech on my leg. I pulled it off and the blood started to flow. Then I saw another, and as I pulled it off, there were more! They came faster than I could get them off and as I started flinging them in every direction I also began to scream and though nobody but the trees could hear me, it felt much better. I screamed and screamed, and pulled leeches and threw them everywhere, and then I finally just got up and started to run back in the direction I came from, trying to get away from them. That was actually a rather silly thing to do since I was only one kilometre away from the end, and it would take me at least four hours to reach my lovely bungalow again, but that was my instinct and I followed it. I soon had to stop running because the trail was too difficult and slippery and I stopped every couple of minutes to scream and pull leeches off of me. By the end of the trail I had developed a hatred for leeches that surpassed even my hatred of ants. Strangely, though I don't like wasps and bees, I don't have the same hatred of them as I have for ants, and now leeches.

So it was that I enjoyed the rainforest scenery much more on the way in than on the way out and when I finally arrived at my bungalow and peeled off my socks, they were sopping wet and bloody (the left one was more red than it was white) from leeches that had attacked me unknown and dropped off to let the blood flow. I read later in the Visitor Centre that the leeches release an anticoagulant into the blood to stop it from clotting so that they can feed more easily and so when they are full and drop off, the anticoagulant is still acting and so the blood keeps flowing.

Not knowing what to do for leech bites, I put some tea tree oil on them. I now trust tea tree oil for everything, since it stopped my cold in its tracks the day after I started taking it in water, and it seems to stop mosquito bites from itching, too! Magic!

The next day I took a much tamer and more developed route, with stone stairs put into the sides of the mountain and handrails on the sides of the trails. There were far fewer leeches on this trail, and I was able to indulge in my rainforest fantasies again. The biologist side of my (if there is a biologist side?) was awakened by this rainforest. I think if it wasn't for the leeches, I could happily live and study in the rainforest forever.

The same night as I watched the darkness approach, I watched a great rainstorm. Here is what I wrote in my notebook immediately after:

"I have just witnessed a real rainforest monsoon from the most favourable place possible -- not the inside of a house, not out hiking and in the middle of it (like earlier today), not teaching a classroom full of children, and not in the middle of a dulcimer lesson... but sitting out on the balcony of my treehouse in the sun. I watched it approach from far away, so quickly! It started to drip and the sound of the trees and bamboo waving in the wind transformed so gradually into the soft rain that it was impossible to tell when the wind ended and the rain started. Within seconds it had increased to a downpour. I debated as to whether to get up and close my windows and take my drying socks inside, but decided against it and am now happy I did since I would have missed it otherwise. The downpour strengthened into a deafening roar and soon it was impossible to hear anything other than the roar and it was impossible to see further away than the two palm trees nearest my balcony. All through this I stayed dry under the overhang but could have reached out with one hand to touch the rain at any point, and I breathed in the scent of it constantly. Then, as quickly as it had come, it receded and I watched the clouds move to the next valley over to dump their offering. Everything around me is still steaming and dripping confusedly at what just passed -- even though this happens several times a day in the rainforest, it still seems to take everyone and everything but the forest itself by surprise. Anything manmade, even made out of the forest like the bamboo bungalows, cannot comprehend and will never learn to deal with nature's unpredictability."

So now I am back in Surat Thani and staying at the guesthouse where the lady was so nice to me. It is run by a Thai lady and her foreign husband -- he comes from Denmark and they have a 2 year old girl who is SO cute! She speaks Thai and Danish and understands English though she refuses to speak it. It is amazing.

For the next 12 days, I will not be doing any blog updates, and will not be able to send or receive any email because... just this once, I am giving in to the backpacker trend. I have not been bar-going, I have not indulged in the backpacker massage clinics, and I have not gone on the absurdly commercial elephant treks designed for backpackers. But the idea of a meditation retreat intrigued me, and even though all the backpackers do it, I just had to try! It starts tomorrow and for information about exactly what I will be doing each day, see the website:

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