I was up again at 6am with the audio recorder and binoculars. There were also groups of the school kids with binoculars and bird books. I found a little path into the jungle and put the recorder down and pressed the button. Just like the camera gets me to look at things differently than I would without it, the recorder had me focusing on the sounds. It was like a piece of music. All these different critters contributing in different ways. (We checked the tapes today in Korat and they are great. Too bad we didn’t learn how to post pod-casts before we left. If we don’t figure it out here, we’ll post some jungle sounds when we get back.)
When I got back, Joan was sitting on the bed, dressed, but wrapped in the comforter. We quickly got our stuff together and walked to have breakfast, stopping to look at the birds in the field. Red-vented Lapwings we’d seen at Bharatpur, swallows.
Our guide turned out to be a 64 year old retired park driver. He’d been at the park since it was brand new – the first Thai National Park, opened in 1962. He said there’d been lots of changes. In the old days no one came. They didn’t know about it. There were no roads. And they were afraid of the tigers. Now there are only 6 or 7 tigers left. We had an 8 km walk, which turned out to be more rigorous than most 5mile walks. Ups and downs.
Vine-like branches an inch or two in diameter looped around overhead, across the trail, and underfoot. A certain kind of palm has a long extension of the leaves that hangs out over the trail and is covered with little thorns looking for a shirt or hat to grab onto. But it is the dry season so the trail wasn’t muddy or slippery. There was also ample evidence that elephants had been on the trail recently. I’m not sure how they manage – it really is just a one person path. There was a concert of birds and insects all the time. At one point we listened to the gibbons howling and chattering away in the distance. We stopped to try to see the birds we could hear, but rarely succeeded because they were high up in the trees. At one ;point hundreds of butterflies lifted up from their resting places as we came by. We saw a couple of Greater Horn Bills. Our guide was delightful and I’m glad we had him. Speaking Thai really comes in handy, though people are so warm and hospitable it doesn’t really matter. And Joan’s Thai is really coming along well. Toward the end of the hike, we stopped at a small waterfall – a lovely little spot, with rocky outcroppings and there was a blue whistling thrush on the other side. Pak said in Thai it was a “Nok Ian Tham.” Nok is bird, Ian is the name of this kind of bird, and Tham is cave, where they like to hang out. Then up a little further to the bigger waterfall that was the destination. I’d had a slight tightness in the back of my right heal when we walked over for breakfast. It never really hurt, though I was aware of it on the hike. But eventually, when we got dropped off where the food is, I realized I couldn’t walk without pain. In the little shop where’d I’d gotten the candles, they had small bags of ice cubes. When the girl heard why I needed the ice, she just took out a handful of ice cubes and gave them to me in a plastic bag. So I sat down with my leg on another chair, icing my heal. The lady at the info center offered to drive us back to the room since I couldn’t walk. It was another early evening.
Today [Thursday, March 8), my foot was slightly better – I could limp around in my sandals – but I wasn’t in any shape to do any more walking than necessary. Joan walked to the visitor center while I stayed on the porch and enjoyed the jungle symphony in the cool morning air. The visitor center lady drove up to get me at 9am and we spent the morning on the bird watching deck at the visitors’ center. The birds are really hard to spot, but sitting there for several hours I began to see them. Familiar ones – a drongo, not sure which kind. The black crested bulbul. And a few others I couldn’t quite identify. Being forced to just sit had its advantages. The driver picked us up at 11:15am and drove us all the way to the bus stop in Pak Chong, where the bus to Korat was leaving immediately. As we drove back down to lower elevations and then out of the park, I was really glad we stayed inside the park. Aside from the fact we didn’t have any traveling to do, the weather was so much cooler up in the park. And before long we were back at the Sima Thani where the front desk staff know us already. And soon I was on the bed with my foot on ice again and we watched the Woody Allen Aphrodite movie on Star TV. I wasn’t impressed. Watching birds on the deck at Khao Yai was much better.
