Each morning at our resort a breakfast was served, and each successive morning the self-serve part of the menu got smaller and smaller. On Saturday breakfast had an omelet bar, cooked tomatoes, potatoes and onions, cereal bar, toast bar, various cooked sausages, various Thai style cooked meats, fried rice, noodles and more. By our last breakfast on Monday this had whittled down to the only thing self served being ketchup, with our meals ordered off of the menu.
The only tour we’d already purchased on Saturday was the “Tree-top Adventure.” That didn’t start till 2pm, so we decided to go to the beach first. We were informed that the white-sands beach transport was only available twice a day, so we went to Emerald Cove instead.
We saw all ages of skittering white sand crabs running across the beach to dive in their holes.
After sitting on the deck chairs for a few minutes we got back in the two-rows transport and headed to the Khlong Phlu Waterfall.
The waterfall was reached by taking a 600 meter hike through the jungle.
After the short hike, waterfall visitors are free to dive into the cool waters at the fall’s edge. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to swim in a real life tropical island waterfall (pool). There were already ten or fifteen tourists in the more shallow end, so Sam and I hiked up to a more dangerous deep end where the waterfall surging water becomes the placid pool. I suppose “pool” may be a poor description as the water does keep on flowing down the hill eventually ending up at a creek that flows beside a small air strip and out onto the beach where we’d waded only an hour before.
Sam and I took turns swimming to the other side of the pool. It was actually much more exhausting than it looks since the water was churning rapidly. As soon as I touched the surface on the other side I came face to face on the black rocks with a monster spider. Look where my gaze is going in the photo (tightly cropped from a photo from the other side of the pool) and you can just make out the stripe on the spider’s back. If you still can’t find it look for the “triangle” at the bottom of the checkmark.
It wasn’t quite a tarantula, but it was certainly larger than anything I’d ever seen in the forest back in the States. The abdomen section was a big bulbous black blob at least the size of my thumb with a yellow racing stripe, followed by two smaller sections and held aloft by long spindly legs stretching from end to end about the size of my extended thumb to pinkie. Ironically my first thought wasn’t “oh crap, that’s probably poisonous”, it was “my camera is over there on the other side of the pool – damn!”
By 11am the pool was teaming with tourists. It was so bad that we could no longer get our photo taken at the entrance with an unobstructed view of the waterfall. The photo below was the best we could get after waiting for the constant stream of incoming gawkers to pass by.
After walking back from the waterfall we had lunch at the first vendors on the side of the road. It was rotisserie chicken and maybe one of the best I’d ever had. It sounds silly, but this was perhaps the most enjoyable meal I had on the trip. We spent our meal trying to guess the spices they’d used in the marinade.
A short hop into another two-rows and we were back at the hotel to change into our close-toed shoes to go to the Tree-top Adventure.
We decided to take a quick dip in the pool before going to the zipline.
After our ziplining in Chiang Mai last year the Tree-Top Adventure here was kind of a let down. However, our opinions were heavily tempered by two things that were (probably) beyond the proprietors’ control: slow guests ahead of us and a massive nest of mosquitoes.
We had both sprayed ourselves with mosquito spray before beginning the adventure, but after literally hours of standing around in the nest – getting bitten was an inevitability. 24 hours later it would become apparent just how much the little vampires sucked out of us. On Sunday my legs looked like I’d contracted chicken pox out in the jungle.
The “adventures” themselves were fun as we were largely left unguided after a short training session. It could have been a great deal of fun if we weren’t stuck behind a family of European tourists who were apparently very scared of heights. This compounded the mosquito problem for us as our only option while a scared 14 year old Belgian girl wobbled at the beginning of a cable bridge was to stand on the forest floor and swat at the bugs circling our legs like sharks to chum.
In between smashing blood bubbles on our legs we had fun swinging, zipping, climbing and walking through the tree tops.
Two days later I took a photo of my leg and all the bites:
After getting back to the hotel I splashed in the pool while Sam read and then we showered up and ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. I decided to have my first Mai Tai.
