Thursday, Feb 25 - Bangkok to Khao Yai National Park

Up at 5 AM, suitcases out at 5:45 and down to another fantastic breakfast buffet. I was feeling queasy and only had museli with longran fruits and coffee,, but I felt much better! We met in the lobby at 6:40 and set off in two comfortable vans, with another van for the cooks! Pretty plush!




Bangkok is about the size and population of LA , so it took us an hour of freeway driving to get out of the city and into the flat agricultural land consisting mostly of rice paddies. We stopped a couple of times to walk through grassland and saw several beautiful birds.

We stopped at Wat (temple) Pai Lom, a famous Buddhist monastery. The temple areas protect their wildlife so they are a good place to bird, and I could get some culture!

Our galley van pulled up and set up a table with coffee, tea, & cookies. We walked behind the wat and saw several hundred Lyles’s Fruit Bats hanging in trees. Their heads are covered in reddish fur and they look like foxes, thus they are often called Flying Foxes. They were flapping their wings to cool themselves in the 90 degree heat and then wrapping themselves up just like Dracula. Pretty neat!

We then drove to Ayutthaya, the original capitol of Siam in the 13 and 1400s before it was weakened by invasions from Burma and the king moved the capitol to Bangkok. It is a beautifully preserved area of temples and shrines showing the basic brick structure without all the gold and colorful decorations.

It was the middle of the afternoon and we were getting pretty tired, but revived upon seeing limestone peaks and cliffs appear as we gained a bit of elevation and left the paddies and entered orchards of papaya, mango and bananas. We drove into a park surrounded by limestone spires to a Buddhist monastery that has a wide staircase bordered by two enormous dragons that climbs up a sheer limestone cliff up about 500’. Quite spectacular! We were there to look for the very rare Limestone Wren-babbler which unfortunately eluded us, but the staircase more than made up for it to me!

After another hour’s drive we finally arrived at Khao Yai National Park and our hotel, a rather modest, but very pleasant, place to stay. After several beers and a good dinner of various vegetable, chicken and beef dishes we collapsed into bed….we meet for breakfast at 5:30 tomorrow