Journey to Phraya Nakhon Cave

Day Two

We woke up early the next day for our big hike.  Kinsey, my co-worker, recommended we all go down to Phraya Nakhon Cave.  I’m so glad he made that recommendation.  I LOVED the jagged mountains on our way there, the jungle everywhere, and the tropical way of life we saw everywhere.  Reminded me a lot of my mission days in the South Pacific.  We told the kids we might get to see monkeys if we were lucky, but Kinsey said he hadn’t ever seen any in the wild (he’s lived here 2 years).  Here are some photos of our drive down:

We parked right next to the ocean (Gulf of Thailand) and started our hike into the jungle.  (side note: if you appear to be a foreigner, the fee for entry is 4-5 times higher than if you’re a local.  I showed them my Thai driver’s license, but they still wanted the higher price. Can you imagine that in the States?  “Sorry, but you appear to be from Mexico, you need to pay $50 for these tickets.”   But I digress).

Within 5 minutes of our hike, luck was with us!  We saw some monkeys!  We didn’t get a great view of them, but still, it was pretty awesome – and helped us appreciate we really were in the jungle.  We were climbing quickly and the view was spectacular:

I came upon these HUGE ants on the side of the path and it made me grateful we don’t have any of these back in Houston:

Even though it was only 9:30am, it was really humid.  I was carrying all of our water and was dripping wet from the sweat pretty quickly.  BUT, the nature was so breathtaking and the views so stunning, who cares??

We came down the other side of the mountain and got a glimpse of where the major part of the hike would start – on this white sand beach.  Wow!

We all took a break from the first half of our hike and enjoyed the cool breeze on this great beach.  Again, it brought back a lot of memories of my time in New Caledonia:

Next post, the amazing hike to the cave (and more monkeys)…