Stunning Khura Buri
More Khura Buri
Junga, Junga, Junga-Junga Rock!!
We take a decent schlep in land to Khura Buri National park. You have to see this place! We've bagged a room overlooking a lake and jungle (you no go.....animals!!) We have a pool surrounded by hanging creepers falling from coco nut palms and a sheer rock face. Sitting having din dins and a bat flies in through the open screens, patrols the room easily avoiding the ceiling fans and out through an open window. He repeated this amazing flying act a few times. The insect cacophany as night falls is amazing, as are the pyrotechnics offered up by the fire flies from the trees opposite our room.
Path to our hut
The Hobbit Clause
Back in my work days I would encourage the teams toward concise reporting. 10 bullet points max, plus a conclusion and reccomendation then off to the pub. To encourage this I'd suggest that if a report was longer than 6 pages and a Hobbit hadn't shown up by page 5 I'd lose interest and stop reading.
We're off up into the mountains and Khao Sok national park. The landscape has that Middle Earth\land that time forgot quality such that you expect Bilbo Baggins and a dozen Dwarves or a mastodon to tromp into sight at any moment.
We get ourselves to the ranger station before 8am, it's still 29 degrees but we are only the second visitors signed into the hiking trail. Our reward is virtually complete peace and quiet as we tramp through the rain forest.
We can hear lemurs making a noise in the trees in the distance, very spooky in the early morning misty-ness. We eventually get to see a couple of families of these monkeys. We try to encourage them to kill any of their number who insist a tree or any land belongs to them and wants to partition it such that it's illegal to hunt there " If one of you invents a machine to pick fruit and wants to pay you peanuts to operate it, him also should you kill".
You stay where you are mate!!
By the time we get back to the station some 4 hours later we are drenched in perspiration as the temperature has risen steadily and gets to 37 by 2pm. Then the sky just opens..... it pisses down, stair rods don't do it justice and we're then treated to a dry electric storm which lasts well into the night.
The power goes out and robbed of air con, we do what all good British subjects would do, blame the Russians, drink gin and beer before the fridge looses it's cool.
Bilbo Baggins
Out on the deck of our bungalow we're treated to a fire fly firework display, visited by Bilbo the toad (I've seen smaller chickens in Tesco) and Kim spots a scorpion living in a burrow just beyond the deck.....By now it's 8pm ................doubtless we'll be checked out and halfway to phuket by 8am!
Ralph, The Turtle Woman and the Orgasm bat
Hiking into the Rain Forest we're surrounded by a cacophony of insects, it's really unbelievable the amount of noise they make! At one point a bug the size of a Chinook hurtles toward us, it makes no attempt to avoid us knowing presumably that it would enter and exit the skull of anything smaller than a Guar (see previous chapter to find out what the f*ck an Guar is) in the opposite trajectory of the bullet that Killed JFK.
Seeing such a bug puts us in mind of the source of our aversion to cruising.
Once when in Florida we took the option of a short, three day cruise to The Bahamas. Lovely on the face of it. However at dinner we were placed on a table with Ralph and the Turtle woman. There were another couple who we never saw as the wife suffered from severe sea sickness ("always has always will"......P'raps not the best holiday choice then?........"well at these prices")
Man!! They got some bugs in Flo-Duh!
The Turtle womnan had recently had an operation and was encased in a kind of upper body shell under her clothing. When she sat down her head all but disappeared as the "shell" rose up leaving just two beady eyes and a furrowed brow poking out the top. When she wanted to talk or convey some food to her gob she stretched her kneck up, slotted a spoon or fork into her cake hole, you saw the morsel disapear down her gullet then the head would disapear down to relative safety again, and she'd fix you with her beady little eyes.
"Course" she said, kneck stretched to maximum,
"we all could never come to England" kneck disapears...
"why Not?"
"Cus y'all just eat squirrel"
We're not sure what to say to that, turtle woman is way down in her shell, just the top of her head is visible.
"Um, but we're eating beef just now" we say.
"sure but when you're home y'all just eat squirrel"
"What on earth makes you think that"?
Turns out her son is at university in England and writes home begging for food parcels because he won't eat squirrel. We guess that in getting to the UK he's found out that Budwieser isn't actually beer but is frozen piss and since discovering real beer that's where all the money goes so he's concocted the squirrel story, or he's put his mates letter in the wrong envelope where he's telling how his English girlfriend wants him to eat her "squirrel".
Her husband, Ralph shares his hobby with us.
"I jus' retired and we moved to Floh-Duh, man oh man they got some bugs in Floh-Duh don't they honey?"
"They sure do Ralph"
Ralph's hobby involves sneaking up on insects, giving them a blast from a hand held fire extinguisher, then popping the poor little sod into a transparent plastic sarcophagus which he loads into a purpose built freezer rack which he keeps in the garage.
"How many bugs I got out there now honey"
Kneck up....
"Hundreds Ralph" ..........
Kneck Down
"I reckon so ..........maybe a thousand?"
kneck up.......
"No, not a thousand Ralph"
kneck down...
"Hunnerds though. right,"?
kneck up.....
"Yes Ralph, hundreds"
kneck down.....
Ralph would love Thailand. If you can imagine anything bug shaped we've found a pair of them going at it against one of our windows out here. We have a bat, like a tennis tracket, you put 4 big batteries in it and press a button while whacking bugs with it...they go up in sparks....... Assuming Ralph and Turtle woman have passed on it would be fitting if they'd been re-incarnated as Thai Bugs
"Oh Ralph baby now that's what I call eating squirrelllllllllllllllllllll zzzzzzzzzzzzzzaappppp!!" ......The Orgasm Bat!!
Happy Songkran
Happy 2561 !!!
It's Thai new year and to celebrate we're of to Khao Lak, Andaman beach paradise. It's another beautiful drive along palm and magnolia fringed roads. No self service here, we drive into the gas station; as usual it's searingly hot; four teenage staff are sitting in the scant shade offered by the petrol pumps.. ...chain smoking.
One stubs his fag and pops it in his shirt pocket, fills us up and waves us off.
As we leave a guy in shirt and tie strides from the office toward the kids. Now they're gonna get it we think.
He bums a fag, takes out a lighter, they all retreat behind the pumps and puff away just visible through the heat haze and fuel vapour.
Latest comments