Okay, we’re back from Khao Yai. Khao Yai is a national park that’s to the northeast of Bangkok (see this helpful map). It’s mountainous and still full of jungle. As is customary when we leave Bangkok, I forgot to take any photos, especially good ones. But here is some of what happened.
The national park is big and full of a lot of things, though we didn’t see many of them. First we went on a little trail that had fine lookouts over a vertiginous drop:
Then we had lunch at a place which had a nice sign reading “Khao Yai Welfare” which I failed to photograph. We were visited by this garbage deer who was busying herself eating the welfare refuse:
Shortly after this picture was taken, all the dishes did fall off the bench and the staff shooed the deer away, though she didn’t go very far. The deer are extremely large, more like low-slung elk than white-tailed deer. Maybe this is what happens when deer are fed on meat scraps. They don’t seem like deer that one would want to trifle with.
After that we went to attempt to find a waterfall because that is what you do in Khao Yai. Along the trail were threatening signs like this:
But we did not see any crocodiles, maybe because there is only one of them. Khao Yai is also full of wild elephants; we didn’t see any of them either. We did see signs of them:
There were fresher signs of them, but I have your delicate sensibilities in mind, dear reader. What we’d forgotten in all of this, of course, was that it was the dry season and not the wet season, so that the waterfalls were not so much waterfalls as small trickles:
They were still very pleasant. Probably in the wet season the river would have deluged the path and the crocodile would have eaten us.
At the trail head we were confronted with inscrutable pictograms:
And a relative of the previous garbage deer, this one who seemed to have developed a taste for campers, or at least tents:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/garbage-deer.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
At this point, we decided to leave for our own safety. Back at the resort, Harriet demonstrated some promise in pig-training:
Also we saw this fine lizard:
Some other things happened, who can even remember. The area around Khao Yai is chock-full of faux-Italian villages for some reason, which basically seem to exist so that Thai tourists can take pictures of each other in them. This sounds like it would be entertaining but it is not. Basically it’s like this:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_0469-480p.mov” width=”360″ height=”640″]
After that we went to the Chokchai Cowboy Farm which is basically false advertising as though don’t grow any cowboys there. But Harriet got to ride a pony:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_0477-480p.mov” width=”360″ height=”640″]
So it wasn’t entirely a waste. And after that we went home, the end.