May 18th, 2006 - Out of the Jungle

We've officially left the jungle. We stayed in a jungle in bungalows about 2 hours outside of Surat Tahni. The bungalows were owned by a really nice Thai family who were very welcoming and extremely generous to us all. The owner, 'Towey', drove us wherever we wanted to go free of charge (this was however in the back of a wagon type truck, which is esentially a pick-up truck with benches in the back and a roof, nothing unusual here). It's amazing how kind and friendly everyone is here.

The jungle was a little bit scary the first night. It took some getting used to hearing all the sounds of the bugs and god only knows what else while we were trying to sleep.

The first morning there we decided to go on a trek through the jungle, without a guide. It was just us and a map! We tucked our pants into our socks and went on our way. We were told to watch out for leeches that are quite common in the jungle.

After about an hour or two into the trek it started to rain, and then POUR! This went on for the entire trek, which was 5 hours in total. We didn't let the rain stop us so we did what we planned to do on the trek. We found a river in the jungle, in the pouring rain, and went for a swim with our bathing suits and running shoes on (though we could've just left our clothes on, that's how soaked they were). It was pretty awesome swiming in a river in the jungle! Our lunch was soaked, but it didn't matter. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, we didn't see any snakes or monkeys though. We weren't able to take pictures either because of the rain.

The following day in the jungle we decided to go on a tubing trip. This was about two hours of just tubing through the river. It was pretty cool, but a little bit long. We had two guides that came with us to make sure we didn't scrape against any branches and that we stayed out of trouble. I think there was something else they were worried about, but just didn't tell us! Walter had a bit of a bumpy ride, smashing into bamboo trees overturning his tube. The rest of us were pretty much okay, we had our running shoes on.

When we weren't busy on treks and other activities we were hanging out with the locals at the main house playing cards and drinking whiskey.

There was one afternoon that we went to feed the monkeys, but not all of them came out of the trees to see us 'cause it was a little bit rainy.


Well two days in the jungle was enough for us, especially when on the last day we found a snake in our room underneath our clothes! See ya!!!!