Odd. That doesn’t look like South Korea…

I know a little while ago I mentioned I was going on holiday to South Korea, but somehow my long weekend in Soul turned into 10 days in Thailand. At first I tried to capture my experiences as a video log (vlog), which I am assured is the next big thing in thrusting your unwanted opinions on people online, but it turns out I’m horrible at it – just horrible – so here is a good ol’ fashioned written entry with some photos instead. Believe me, it’s better this way!

Now. It may come as something of a shock, but it turns out that Thailand has some quite pretty scenery! I split my holiday between a jungle tree house and a lake and when I arrived at the tree house I was immediately in love. This is the view from the balcony and the day after arriving I was slightly bemused to find myself floating down that river in an inner tube; a peaceful experience only mildly marred by the shock of being bitten by a puffer fish. Not that they can do you any harm, but it did somewhat disturb my equanimity. In the early evening the monkeys clambered with charming gracelessness on the cliffs.

There was a walk through the jungle and my first ever pillion ride on a motor cycle[1] as well as a ride on an elephant (hmmm) and a Thai massage (owowowowowOW! ARGHHHHHH! Ahhhhhhhhh…) and then… and then there was this:

And suddenly the jungle treehouse seemed dull and uninteresting.

I pootled around on the lapis lake in my own longtail boat with driver and my own guide:

Past cliffs whose sheer scale was incomprehensible:

Do you see that narrow strip of scar showing the previous high water mark? That’s 10 meters high.

We hiked through real jungle (not the macaddamed tourist type I’d been shown previously) and ate fiery dry curry from greaseproof paper packages with our hands:

And when we got to the caves that were our final destination, we clambered gracelessly through them like the monkeys I’d left behind, before getting back in the boat and roaring back to the rafthouse with the wind in our hair; only stopping to jump off the boat and swim in a cove of giant teeth:

I did all of those things, and more[2], but mostly what I did was sit on the deck of the floating hut and stare and stare and stare, trying to imprint the scene on my brain so that, after I was gone, I would still be able feel some tiny fraction of what it was like to be there.

One day I will go back.

1. I only remembered my abject phobia of being on the back of a two wheeled vehicle controlled by someone else (I was bitten by a tandem as a child) when we were already half way to our destination; I was having so much fun it seemed churlish to panic. And one more piece of childhood baggage went *pop* and evaporated.

2. I swam in the warm water of the lake with the thunder and lightening crashing around the hills and the cool rain splashing into the water around me, I watched the whole sky turn the colour of Sex on the Beach as the sun went down behind the clouds and, on my last morning, we went out in kayaks and, without the boat engine to scare them off, we got within 6 feet of a troop of long-tailed macaques foraging on the shore.