Khao Sok

The train that carried us south from Bangkok was a warm, rickety affair.  Unlike the modern coaches that shuttle tourists north to Chiang Mai and back, this one looked like it had rattled straight through the night out of the 1940s,  full of dust and wind and men with loud snores and a few happy babies and some strange, queasy smells.  The walls were thickly painted slats of wood, and some large metal fans spun in tilted cages along the ceiling where the bags jostled and invited the prying fingers of thieves.  The windows hung open on their clackity hooks and the air raced in and out of the car, tossing in the ashes of burning fields and bringing with it the hiss and chitter of insects and swamp smells and the loom of dusk as we headed into darkness through rice paddies and isolated, beast-shaped cliffs stained pink from the sky.  We worked crossword puzzles and plowed through cheap paperback novels.  We played sticky games of cards and  drank warm beer in a smoky dining car full of bored attendants and one drunken Aussie fool who kept making “naughty tiger” noises at the Thai women, who squealed and batted uselessly at his big meaty paws.  I tried not to watch.  The train ran out of will an hour before our stop, and we crept quietly the final aching miles, leaning out the windows and peering into the dull sodium-lit rural stations, desperate for a sign we could read through sleepy, English-only eyes.  We hauled ourselves out at Surat Thani at 2 am, promptly allowed ourselves to get ripped off by a cab driver who went 10 km out of his way to get diesel and then backtracked along the same road to where we started to take us to our hotel, hoping we wouldn’t notice we’d paid through the nose to go a handful of blocks.  We stumbled into bed around 3:30 and were awakened by the cleaning ladies, needing us out of our rooms by 11 am.  We looked longingly at the “lagoon pool” we hadn’t had time to enjoy, and ate a disappointing meal in a listless little joint at the edge of the parking lot, where we’d been directed by hotel staff.

Things took a turn for the better as the manager of the hotel just happened to be around as we were asking about rides to the jungle we’d read about in our guidebooks, and he also just happened to own a resort there, and just happened to be heading that way in his extremely well-appointed brand new pickup truck with air conditioning and leather seats.  We paid for his fuel, and he gave us a very comfortable ride the final few hours to the Khao Sok rainforest, where we were dropped off at the end of a small road full of bungalows on stilts and in trees and made of everything from concrete to rattan, ranging in price from dirt cheap to practically free.  Handpainted signs promised alcohol and guides and massages and reggae-nite, and we checked ourselves into a family-run place off the beaten path where rooms were hidden by trees and chickens and geckos scattered around the yard.

At 160 million years, the Khao Sok rainforest ranks as one of the oldest forests in the world, even more ancient than parts of the Amazon basin.  It is home to gibbons, leopard cats, long-tailed macaques, several varieties of poisonous snakes, and zillions of birds and insects.  There are 4 separate varieties of cicadas alone, each recognizable by their distinct songs.  Khao Sok also boasts the world’s largest flower, a dense and weirdly meaty-looking thing that is equal parts Dr. Seuss and Little Shop of Horrors, the Rafflesia Arnoldi, or “bua phut” in Thai, which translates most delightfully as “Corpse Flower,” a graphic but accurate reference to the blossom’s aroma. (Click here for more).

If you have never been to a rainforest, there are few places on earth that feel more messily, swarmily, richly alive.  They have none of the vast austerity of deserts, or the dark, reverse infinity of oceans, nor the spare and rugged complexity of mountainous ecosystems.  Many places in the world feel old, but few feel old in such an organic, sentient way as rainforests.  The presence of ancient trees wrapped in so many twisting, growing, rotting, knotted layers of chlorophyllic combat and the overwhelming shuddering movement of every single leaf and strand and vegetal thread made inanimate by breeze and insect and slithering life has a relentlessness to it that is different than other biomes.  Stepping into a rainforest, one is so quickly devoured and swallowed by shadow and sunpatch and the enormity of it all, one’s own skin seems to revolt and return to an earlier state of sensitivity, jolting at every touch and coming alive with the anticipation of crawl and sting.  Humans are soft and vulnerable and have poor eyesight and weak hearing.  Rainforests are loudly alive.

Our bungalow crouched at the edge of the jungle, hunkering on stilts and facing out over a small river and clusters of tangled treetops onto a tilted sky and the angle of sunset.  In the evenings we lay beneath the gauze of mosquito nets and films of our own sweat and listened.  The insects came in waves, as if ushered in by the gentle hand of a conductor and then hushed again at the end of their movement; as if marking time together through the end of each day and the beginning of the next.  Some keened sadly in a concert whine that ended in a shuddering sob; others hissed and chattered like tiny winged monkeys; others screamed like babies; some cut the eardrums with miniature saws screeching into sheets of metal.  There were chirps and rattles and hiccups and growls and every leaf, every dark corner had a sound of its own.  Geckos made sounds.  The chickens made sounds.  The jungle seemed to awaken at dusk and parade each species around in song for its brief aural promenade and then each would settle in again, leaving the heart of night a soothing background murmur of rustles and purrs.

The next day, we piled into the back of a pickup truck with a handful of coolly friendly Germans and were hauled a windy, bright hour to the edge of Chieow Laan lake, a magnificent body of water edged by spectacular mountains-turned-hills by the climbing waters of the reservoir formed by the variously-spelled Ratchaphrapa Dam.  There we filed into an open-air longboat and sliced a path across the lake, scoured by sunlight and dazzled by the unlikely geometry of the land formations in that part of Thailand, the suddenness of the cliffs and the wild, exuberant coloration of the rocks and soil.  And of course, draping in thick coats of every shade of green was the jungle itself, erupting out of the rock in every direction with trunks and shoots and bushes and vines and every imaginable size and shape of leaf or root.

At the far end of the lake we came to a dismally picturesque little tourist trap, a series of floating huts slapped together from bamboo and woven mats of grass, where we were encouraged to swim and were treated to an “authentic” Thai meal and had the option of paying out the nose for chilled beverages or alternative snacks.  We lounged in the awkward company of several other tour groups for a while, and finally were piled back into our longboat and sent down a murky tributary into a gloomier patch of forest, full of the white bones of drowned trees jutting up from the surface of the lake,  the hoots of monkeys, and the reek of algae and mud.  “Apocalypse Now” came to mind.

We landed at a marshy bank and clambered out into a small sea of waist-high grasses, welcomed by a cloud of rioting white butterflies.  Our guide stripped to the waist and strapped an impressive-looking knife to his belt, and the next thing we knew, we were wandering through the rainforest, pushing branches and leaves from our path, wading across streams in flimsy sandals, swatting at invisible insects, and marvelling at the patterns of light that fell on the ground all around us, scattered by the veils of leaves and branches overhead.  There were flowers and smells and sounds and rock formations like elephants and castles and tubes.  Our guide knew enough English to point out the happily obvious: “big tree,” was one bit of forest lore he provided.  “Butterfly,” was another, with a smile.  Also, “mushroom.”  I tried to ask him when the dam had been built and the valley flooded, but he shook his head and said something that sounded like “toilet monkey,” and we both laughed for different reasons, and I still am not sure about the age of the dam.

After about an hour of bushwhacking and picture-taking, vine-swinging and muddy plodding, we came to a place where the small river we’d been crisscrossing flowed under a dense overhang of rock and disappeared into darkness between stalactites and a rounded granite mass at the entrance of a cave.  Another tour group sat smoking and wearing ridiculous pointed elf caps made of leaves (presumably their guides had better senses of humor than our own).  Several of us were handed headlamps, and the rest encouraged to pile our camera equipment and anything else we might have been carrying into a large plastic garbage bag and then seal it into one of the guides’ backpacks.  He gestured at his ribcage, indicating the water levels inside the cavern.  Naturally, we assumed this was dramatic flair added for the benefit of our senses of adventure.  Hah.

The next thing we knew, we were sloshing through the river in utter darkness, the heat of the day receding quickly behind us and glimmering only faintly between what then were clearly the jaws of the cave, pointed stones hanging fanglike between us and the warm, well-lit jungle.  We turned and followed the few circles of light ahead of us and the sounds of splashing.

I had never been spelunking before, and had no idea what to expect from the belly of a cave.  I think I had a sense that it would be like a bear’s den, or something cool and dry and full of whispers, a place from a child’s uncomfortable dream.  I had no idea how deeply alien subterranean worlds can be, how utterly unlike the surface of stones, as different from the earth’s skin as our own outsides are from our twisting, mysterious, unlit inner guts.  We staggered somewhat unevenly, sometimes splashing through the river itself, other times feeling our way along sand and rocks.  I had a tiny light in one hand that revealed the walls to be full of striations and color: bright streaks of quartz in places, looming columns and cloudlike plumes that looked as if they’d dripped down from enormous molten balls of wax; there were sparkling places where the darkness gave way to smooth surfaces covered in tiny stars; there were jagged broken ledges and fungusy shapes, stalactites and -mites and vast upward reaches in cathedral cones and dense, musty spaces where we had to kneel or duck.  There were creatures that lived in that bizarre world.  A frog pretended to be a rock when our guide prodded it and picked it up.  A crab flexed its way into our tiny circle of light and then scattered off, surprised.  There were spiders - hundreds of spiders, large ones, small ones, dusty, spindly ones.  We leaned in to crevices to see them crouching, and then made silent promises never to touch a surface again without seeing it lit first.  Shadows ran on the floor and we whispered private pacts with our toes to just keep moving, to ignore the thousands of teensy legs moving beneath us.  We came to caverns that felt warm and somehow busy and were ripe with a spicy, filthy musk.  The lamps trained overhead revealed thousands of bats dangling in sleepy clumps, blinking, chittering, their tiny faces clenched like fists against the intrusion of our lights.  As we went further into the caves, the water grew deeper and more vigorous.  Not only were we wading in the darkness, our sandaled feet clinging to whatever purchase they could find in the rushing depths, but at points we were lowering ourselves one by one down waterfalls and then swimming with no sense of how deep the water was nor how far we had to go, just moving forward toward the flicker of others ahead of us, keeping our heads above water and flailing away from the crashing sounds of falling water and the echoes of the others bouncing off the uneven surfaces above us.  Those were the moments of “what in the hell am I doing,” where I wanted to both laugh out loud and completely freak out and instead just kept swimming, praying I wouldn’t lose a flipflop or grab a spider or electricute myself or hit my head and drown, the rush of being both mildly terrified and totally surprised and also a little proud.  There were a lot of jokes of “So, what did you do today?” as we dragged ourselves out onto the rocks in the darkness of the other side.  At long last we came to a place where the air grew lighter again, and glimmers shone through cracks above our heads.  After more than an hour of clambering around in the dark, we made our way to a place where the earth opened up again in a tumble of sharp stones and we sat blinking in the sunlight, breathless and thrilled and exchanging bewildered, knowing looks.  We were all soaked and scraped and a little in awe.  I had no idea things like that existed, worlds like that, such a secret so close to the surface. 

The hike back was anticlimactic and relaxing, a chance to dry off and enjoy the contrast of heat and smells and insect sounds with the dank strangeness of the cave.  We stopped again at the funky little waystation and ate fruit.  A gibbon swung down and rustled a tree near where we sat, and we watched it quietly, excited.  The boat trip back revealed other monkeys, and we startled a small flock of three hornbills from their roost in a tree.  We got home feeling windblown and tired and slept heavily to the tune of cicadas.

The next day was an exercise in opposites.  We paid a young man with a choppy black mullet and skin like polished mahogany to drive us to a temple, where we stripped to our bathing suits and were handed giant innertubes.  We padded barefoot through a cave temple full of humble golden buddhas and sages in tigerskin wraps.  A chime hung overhead with shells and a small discoball.  At the end of the cave was a wide, sluggish river, and we tossed ourselves in with the tubes only to find the water alive with white snapper, thousands of them, jaggy in the water and hungry, nibbling our toes and suits and whipping the surface into a frenzy as our guide tossed them handfuls of dry dog food.  We all laughed and squealed and took turns feeding the fish from our tubes, and then began a lazy float downstream past palm trees and jungle and enormous, rusted cliffs.  It was mellow and peaceful - even the snakes we saw were sleeping, dangling from nearby trees.  Occasionally we hit quick water and spun around like leaves, but mostly we just drifted, dozing, chatting, lolling under a breezy sky.  After a couple of hours we were hauled out of the water to a waiting truck and taken back to the temple, only this time we were handed pieces of thick white bread.  Dozens of sacred long-tailed macaques materialized from the trees and came cautiously seeking snacks, which we fed them.  At first I felt like it was a cheap gimmick, another example of tourism warping a local wonder, but the monkeys were vary wary and not at all interested in being touched.  They weren’t aggressive, either, just wise-looking and small and gentle, taking the bread with bizarre tiny humanoid hands and looking at us with mistrusting golden humanoid eyes. 

After our time in Khao Sok, we were ready to leave the jungle and make our way to the beach, so we packed up the following day and caught a van heading to Krabi, where our experience of the islands in the Andaman Sea began.

~ by knifemaker on February 2, 2008.