Day 6: Welcome to the Jungle

The tooth fairy came! Diane found 55 Thai baht under her pillow this morning when she woke up on the train. It was a surprisingly good night sleep for all of us- the beds were relatively comfy and the cabin was cool and the clickety clacking of the train was soothing.

When we arrived in Surat Thani at 8am I realized I had made a big mistake. I had completely forgotten to send our train information to the place we are staying so that they can pick us up. I panicked, but the travel God’s were on our side! There was a person holding a sign from our jungle lodge (with someone else’s name on it) right as we exited the train. We told him wat happened and 15 minutes later he had secured us a private van. Whew.

The scenery here is dramatic, with bulbous mountains and limestone cliffs surrounded by lush tropical jungle. We zoomed by it all in the van but hopefully we can see a lot more of it over the next few days.

Our Jungle House (that’s the place we are staying) is amazing. Way better than we’d expected. It’s kind of like glamping in the jungle. We are in a two-room (plus bath) wooden house on stilts that opens up to the jungle on all sides. It is sparsely decorated and somewhat rustic (no a/c, limited electricity, no wifi) but immaculately clean. Best of all, we can sit on our porch and listen to tree frogs chirping and birds calling while we watch monkeys play above us in the trees. At night, we see geckos hunting and vying for territory. It is unreal.

We spent our first few hours here exploring the grounds and swimming in the river. Heaven.

Then we headed off on one of the activities we were most excited about on this trip: a visit to an elephant sanctuary. I did my homework and stayed far away from any inhumane elephant riding tours, but this place is more like elephant rescue. They adopt domesticated elephants that have been mistreated or are nearing the end of their lives. Because these elephants were born and raised in captivity they cannot survive in the wild, so they provide a lovely home for them to retire. They are fed 350 kilos of food every day, and have large areas to move about. Their enclosures have a simple gate which the elephants could easily open, but they do not because they choose to stay with safety and plentiful food. One elephant was blind, another had no teeth, one had an injury from being in a car accident, and another has a limp from being kept by her previous owner in a tiny enclosure for a full year where she couldn’t so much as turn around.

We had expected to be able to see the elephants and maybe touch one and help bathe it. It turns out we did so much more than that! In our two hours at the sanctuary, we were assigned an elephant, we prepared her food, fed her by hand (calling out her name so she knew we were friend), slathered her with mud, helped give her a shower, then scrubbed her clean in a pool! Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

After dinner we went on a night safari where we saw lizards, frogs (including a GIANT tree frog the size of a dinner plate), tarantulas, scorpions, two kinds of monkeys (long tailed macaque and the dusky faced langur), and even a fleeting glance of a civet. The civet is a small jungle cat known for fermenting the coffee beans it eats as part of it’s digestive process. Our guide actually used to search for civet feces to sell to crazy foreigners. Gross.

Dusky faced langur

Scorpion (this guide- not ours- cut the poison from it’s tail and delighted in scaring people with it)

The girls were troopers through all of this, even though they were tired and a little scared on the night hike. They asked great questions and were as quiet as any of the adults so as not to scare the wildlife. They loved hearing the guides stories about his scorpion bite, tiger and bear spottings, and his close encounter with a python while swimming in the river. At the end of the hike it was 10pm and they collapsed into a deep sleep under the mosquito netting in our treehouse. Zach and I were not far behind.