Bangkok to Khao Sok

We were out of Bangkok pretty swiftly with the group. We headed to the train station in the evening of the 10th May to catch our overnight train to Khao Sok. We went to the food court (the first of many on this trip) in the train station to ‘eat like a local’. I got myself a chicken and rice dish – classic – and headed for an empty table, except another girl was doing the same thing and headed for the same table. We looked at each other once and nodded and decided to eat together, so, I was really eating with the locals that night.

My food was actually very nice (and very cheap), apart from the little side dish it came with. I could smell it while I was carrying it to my table and he’d put a little bowl of coriander soup on my tray – yuck. I decided I wasn’t doing to eat the soap soup.

When we got on the train, I think most of us were ready for the beds and to have a good rest. Only that’s not what we were faced with. When we left the station all the beds were still in their seat arrangement so we couldn’t have a lie down yet and had to wait for the beds to be sorted. It was a bit of work to get all of our bags tucked under the seats but we managed to eventually shove and sometimes kick the bags underneath. They clearly hadn’t accounted for 18 people with big travel cases trying to all fit into one space in the carriage.

When the beds did come down we all climbed into them and most of us drew the curtain quite promptly and went to bed. I was on a fold down top bunk and it was quite narrow and a couple of times I thought I’d fall off it. But don’t worry – they had two seatbelts to catch you. That was the only safety protection. I didn’t fall off it though and actually managed to sleep a decent amount on the train. Not quite well rested, but rested.

The next morning, we were woken up at 6:30am to jump off the train and onto a bus that took us to a service station stop where we brushed our teeth, went to the toilet and got changed ready for the day ahead. We were then taken to a village in a rubber plantation, where we walked through the forest. They were collecting rubber in little cups that were attached to the trees as rubber ran down the carved trenches in the trunk of the trees. We were in this village for some breakfast. The tour guide told us that they like to do this to support some local families, which is very important to the tour company. The breakfast was simple with noodles, boiled eggs, bread with butter and jam and also some coffee.

Then, we left the rubber plantation and got back on our bus for the main activity for the day. We had a boat tour organised in Khao Sok National Park. We got on a long tail boat and they drove us around on a man made lake that was apparently the Halong Bay of Thailand. I suppose it looked a bit like Halong Bay but really the more impressive thing was the fact that it was a man made feature. It was such a huge volume of water and we were told it was about 80m deep in some places – so don’t drop your sunglasses.

After we’d taken our obligatory photos on the front of the boats, we headed for the real interesting stop on the trip, which was the river rafts. They actually looked more like pods than rafts and were lined up in a row along a pier.

Last time we were in Thailand we also stayed on river rafts but they were made from wood and had no electricity and you could see the river running underneath them under the floor so when I was told we were going to some river rafts that’s what I was expecting. When we turned up, it was very different to what I was expecting but it was very nice all the same.

We were told that we could go swimming in the river and then found out we had to wear life jackets to do so. The life jackets were all size extra large so it was rather funny to watch everyone bobbing around in the river with their life jackets fighting to choke them and them fighting to hold it back down. I eventually worked out that we could clip the bottom straps and arrange them in a way to make a sort of makeshift seat that also stopped the jacket from riding up so I was sitting happy from that point on.

We also had lunch on the raft, which was very tasty, even the fish that got some questioning looks, particularly when we later saw someone catching a fish from the fish ponds they had in the rafts and then taking it into the kitchen. Vera assured us that we weren’t eating a fish from there and that we were eating snapper and the fish in the pond was not snapper.

Finally, we headed to the hotel for the night in the jungle. This is where Aimee had her first encounter with the monkeys. She took her snacks with her to the pool – an inadvisable decision to begin with – and a group of monkeys saw the plastic bag and took it as a good opportunity to have a snack of their own. One of the large monkeys grabbed her almost full pack of oreos and ran through the bushes so she couldn’t get them back. Then, he sat less than 10 metres from us all, stuffing his face with them and he did not share, not even with the baby that shimmied down the tree a bit later on.

And then, in the evening we ate at the hotel and they were really slow with service and very unorganised, which was very annoying. I had to wait probably an hour and a half for some chicken cooked with ginger and some plain white rice and a lot of people had finished eating before others had even got given their food. Safe to say to wasn’t very happy that night about my food. Terrible service, but a lovely location for the hotel and the hotel itself was actually very nice so the food was a big shame. But I did see a frog.