Taxis, Boats, and Buses
When it came time to leave Koh Tao I set myself up with the same travel agent I had used the previous two times. She smiled when I entered her office; Wandee Guesthouse and Travel. (ph#. 084-4518747). She had just returned from South Korea on a short tour. We talked about South Korea for about a half hour before settling on the fact that South Koreans are wonderful people with a rich culture.
I asked to go to Khao Sok National Park for a forth visit. The Park is nestled in the monolith limestone mountains on the Thai peninsula. These mountains continue on down and loosely join with the Malaysian peninsula mountains harboring such places as Cameron Highlands, a tea plantation area and on down to the Taman Negara National Park, a 150 million year old region in Malaysia that was not frozen over during the last ice age and so the animals in it are unique and a breed apart. I’ll get to that later.
I picked up a truck taxi in front of the travel agency just down the street from Asia Divers Resort. A group of us hopped in the back of the truck and headed for the pier where we boarded different ferries bound for various ports, some towards Bangkok, others for Krabi, and a small group of us for Surat Thani. Surat Thani is a medium size town on the east coast of the Thai peninsula and the gateway to cross over the mountains to Khao Sok and further on to the Andaman Sea and the town of Takupa on highway 401.
It’s the beginning of the rainy season but being out on the islands the rainy season seems like it happens somewhere else. On Koh Tao we had a few evening showers and a lot of lightening and thunder the joins with the sunset activity.
The high speed catamaran sped me on to Surat Thani where a bus waited on the pier for those going into town or to another bus station. Instantly I was on the next leg of my journey. The bus left after all travellers were aboard. Due to low season and political issues in Bangkok half the seats were empty. A few hours flew by when the bus pulled over somewhat randomly and the drivers’ assistant gave me the nod to get off. He pointed across the street to a bus stop and restaurant and told me to talk to the man in the restaurant and wait for another bus. I had a quick bite to eat and a tuk tuk pulled up and waived me to him. I got in back and he drove me to a different bus station where I boarded another bus headed for Khao Sok andTakupa.
I arrived around 6 pm at the turn off for Khao Sok as the sun hid behind a jungle green limestone monolith ridge but the sun wasn’t down. The turn off was the same but more building have been erected over the last few years as they do in Thailand. My first visit to Khao Sok was 1996 and back then there was just a bamboo shelter bus stop and trucks would come from the park entrance where there was a string of guesthouses between the river and road the park entrance. The sheltered bus stop was still there but so were a lot of small shops scratching out a living off the coming and going of tourists.
A kindly gentleman named Tawee approached me with an offer for a bungalow for 300 baht but not on the park road, ‘more in the jungle’. He offered free rides to the park or into the village whenever I wanted to go use internet or take a walk into the park or for a swim in one of the many waterfall pools along the trails.
Green Mountain View Guesthouse, Bungalows and Camping. (Ph # 0066-872632481). Call him and he’ll come get you. Green Mountain View Bungalows is on the east side of a green mountain ridge buried between in a rubber tree plantation and the jungle. The bungalows are spacious and vary from 300 baht to 500 baht depending on the number of beds but all bungalows come with an outside walled bathroom open to the sky and really great when it raining. Need I remind you that its warm rain?
There is a full restaurant run by Tawee’s wife and the rest of the family members that are old enough are guides, drivers, whatever you need can be arranged for a reasonable price. There is English is good. I sat with a Swedish woman who had been staying for three weeks. There was a particular glow about her and green Mountain View as an alternative to guesthouse row at the entrance of the park which is also more expensive.
I took a day off and just enjoyed the heat of the day and a light rain in the evening. I decided I would go to ‘Limestone’ Lake, otherwise known as Cheow Lan Reservoir, the next day for an overnight in the jungle and a floating bungalow but first I have to explain some of the history of the Lake.
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