Khao Yai: A World Heritage Site

This weekend was a lot of fun. I cant believe I only have a few weeks left of teaching. 3 to be exact. Ive been planning my end trip with Matt and couldn’t be more excited! It is going to be the experience of a lifetime! Im excited to see how it plays out.

I have to say I am getting very anxious about going back home. I don’t know what my place there is anymore, I don’t know if it will feel like home anymore. I have learned, evolved, and grown so much while here that I don’t know if I am looking forward to being back in California or not. Needless to say I go back and forth on this constantly.

I also find myself in a heightened state of wonderlust. I cant wait for my next adventure and keep seeking job opportunities in other countries. Of course I will finish law school, but I want to see the world, and I don’t want to be stuck. I don’t want golden handcuffs… yet at the same time I see all my friends getting married, getting engaged, having kids, and I get scared! Am I just stalling and postponing growing up and being what society expects me to be as an adult? By doing this am I giving up the possible opportunity of ever being a functioning adult? Oh crazy little mind, you are driving me nuts!

My room has been growing mold all over. There is mold in my shoes, in my clothes, everywhere! It cant be good… I spend 20 hours a day in this room… Not a good thing. These are the small things that make me want to go back home… No job, nothing to do, no school, and the old dysfunctional routine make me want to stay.

Ok back to the weekend… Friday I left school at about noon. I took a van to Bangkok and then went to the Vietnam Embassy to get my Visa for next month. I finished running errands at about 4 and had to wait for Jessica to get out of work and meet me at the BTS. Well like everything in Thailand it took way longer than expected and I waited for a good 3 hours until Jessica finally met me.

We then headed to the minibus station where we met Robbin and got a minibus to Pakchong. We arrived at Pakchong 3 hours later and got picked up by the guest house where we were staying.

We stayed at Greenleaf, which was awesome. It wasn’t very fancy or anything like that but the people who own it and run are awesome. Exhausted we headed to our room and went to sleep relatively early.

On Saturday we woke up very early and had to meet our group at 8 am. We had breakfast and headed out on our tour of Kao Yai (a world heritage site). The whole trip we were riding in the back of a songtao. It was pretty awesome. We drove for about 40 minutes into the park. The park is massive! And it is gorgeous. It is incredibly green and beautiful. Within minutes of having entered the park we saw monkeys, which for some reason like to hang out by the road. It seemed as if they were as curious about us as we were about them.

A few minutes later the tour guide stopped abruptly as he spotted a hornbill. For those of you who don’t know a hornbill looks just like a tucan with an extra beak on top of its beak. It was pretty awesome. We took pictures and kept going.

Our next stop was to look at gibbons. At this point our tour guide was incredibly excited. Gibbons are supposed to be very elusive, very hard to find, and people go on expensive long tours looking for them, lucky for us we were able to spot them about 3 times during our day hike. We took pictures and watched them hike from tree to tree. We then kept driving and finally went on a 3 hour hike. We looked at insects and learned about different plants and ended up at a view point where we had lunch. It was very beautiful, exhausting but beautiful.

After hiking we went to see a waterfall, we hiked around a little bit more, took some pictures, and headed on the last part of our tour: searching for wild elephants. This was the worst part of the tour. We were all cold and exhausted and tired of driving up and down the road, but our tour guide did not want to give up. 

Eventually he did and we headed back to the guesthouse, where we had dinner, relaxed and went to bed.

Another great fun filled weekend in Thailand.