Jungle pics

After almost a week at the beach, we headed about two hours north to the Khao Sok National Park. We went there with an eco tourist outfit called Siam Safari (www.siamsafari.com) who picked us up and drove us there. We stayed in a very nice mud hut, if that’s not an oxymoron, had a nice jungle trek (boys did great, Anna was carried by our own personal sherpa), kayaked and rode an elephant through the rainforest.

It’s a real rainforest, with tigers (only 2-4 now), monkey etc. Of course, all we saw was a turtle, a funky flying type squirrel, a six-inch spider and a huge mango snake asleep in a tree. And a bunch of river fish. But still…

It was great fun and a very beautiful place. Just two hours form a huge tourist center yet very few people seem to get up there. It definitely needs more and better publicity. Maybe I can help in that regard. Anyone know an editor at Conde Nast Traveler or something similar?

The funny thing is Jacob was the instigator of this whole portion of our trip. We were just supposed to stay at the beach the whole time. Everyone in Phuket is a travel agent. Every restaurant, bar and little store advertises as such and is filled with brochures for snorkeling, scuba, sailing, elephant rides… Jacob picked one up while I was buying some beer and soda and carried it over to me very excited.

“Look, dad.” He said. “we should do this. It’s a SLAM Safari.” Yes, he misread Siam as Slam and thought that my belove magazine was somehow leading treks through the Thai jungle. The thing is, it looked really good, so I asked the proprietor and he said, “yes, yes, very good.”

We took the brochure it to the pool and showed Becky and started discussing it. I’m not sure we would have gotten off our asses and actually done anything if Jacob hadn’t been so excited. He kept telling people, “We’re going to the rainforest in two days to ride elephants.” So we did. And were very glad to have done so. The pictures at least begin to capture it, but this was one of the sweetest spots we’ve ever been to.