Khao Sok Day 1 Lake Tour

Bridge:  After much discussing and with a fair bit of reluctance, we handed over 500BHT each for a 1 day Lake Tour.

At 8am we bundled into a minivan with about 20 other ‘farangs’ and set off for Cheow Lan Lake and the Nam Talu River Caves.  It was 65km to the Lake and a further 1 hr long-tail boat ride took us to the floating raft houses.   

After an hour of swimming and an impressing lunch spread of traditional Thai rice dishes and whole deep-fried Wrass fish, we set off on our 3hr jungle trek to the Nam Talu caves.  Everything we passed of came across on our walk seemed enormous – the trees, the leaves, the bamboo even – so thick at the base that I could not fit both my hands around.  They towered almost as high as the 400 year old trees we came across that splayed out at the base of their trunks and make a loud, deep hollow sound when we all started drumming on the trunk with our fists.

The guides were each armed with a lighter to burn off any stubborn leeches from peoples toes and feet.  Although i wore shorts and open rafters, I barely had more than 3 or 4 leeches whereas some of the others in the group seemed to have bites all over, despite their efforts of wearing trousers, socks and closed hiking shoes.

The entrance to the cave was huge but the deeper we got inside the cave, the higher and wider it got.  Armed with a half flat mini maglite torch between the two of us, we had a little trouble negotiating our footwork as well as the hand-sized spiders that seemed to appear on every rock and every  square inch of cave wall!  Their eyes shone luminous orange in the light of the headlamps.  The cave roof was black with screeching bats who were happily relieving themselves on us as we stood underneath them.  The other cave inhabitants were toads, catfish and giant roaches.  The head guide explained that in 2007 (in the month of June no less!) a group of tourists had entered the cave despite warnings from the guide not to do so.  A freak flash flood roared down from the mountains above channeling all the water directly into the lake 800m on the other side.  All seven people were killed.

Although we had only ventured about 100m into the cave, i was feeling uneasy – many of the group remained outside the cave – scared into submission by the shocking story.  The cave was already knee-high with the river waters, and knowing that the rainy season had already begun, the guide was quick to show us back to the cave entrance explaining he didn’t want to risk walking us through to the other side – 100m was enough for all of us anyway.

We trekked back to the boats at the floating rafts and then we were ferried back to our minibus at the pier.  We arrived back at Jungle Huts at around 8pm – but the trip was worth every cent.