The Wandering Hart

The next section of our Southeast Asia trip was not originally planned. We were supposed to spend a couple days in Sumatra trekking and looking for orangutans. Unfortunately things got messed up with flight changes and we had to pivot so we chose to make a couple days trip just a few hours drive from Bangkok to Khao Yai National Park!

Khao Yai National Park isn’t super easy to navigate on your own and, especially considering how much we changed our plans in the end, I’d probably recommend booking guided tours if you go. For our trip, we hired a private driver for a couple days to take us all the way from Bangkok, drive us around while we were there, and drive us to the Bangkok airport at the end. This ran us about $250 USD. I’ve seen guides to traveling to Khao Yai that involved taking the train there and back and either motorbiking around on your own or booking guided tours and that is significantly cheaper! However with our schedule and it being rainy season booking a driver worked best for us and luckily was in budget after cancelling Sumatra.

The first thing we learned about Khao Yai National Park during rainy season is that there are A LOT of leeches. We started out taking a small trail near the Visitor Center and by the end of our short hike had picked off probably dozens of leeches on our shoes and pants. Fortunately we had bought leech socks at the visitor center before starting the hike! In light of the leeches, we decided to pivot our plans to have fewer hikes and more viewpoints after that. On the plus side, by this point we had already spotted many pig-tailed macaques and a great hornbill so things were looking good on the wildlife spotting front!

For the rest of the day we drove around to different viewpoints starting with Haew Narok waterfall, which is the tallest waterfall in the park. Especially since the weather had been so rainy, the waterfall was very full and beautiful! From there we went to Pha Diew Dai overlook which offered panoramic views. Both of these viewpoints did actually require walking short boardwalked hikes so we at least felt like we weren’t just driving from point to point as well.

Unfortunately after Pha Diew Dai the sky opened up and it poured for several hours. We ended up hiding under the food pavilion until it was time for the Night Safari. Lucky for us the rain stopped just in time for us to hop in the truck with a ranger and drive around after dark! The ranger did a great job pointing out the many sambar deer, porcupines, dhole (a type of wild dog), and even a slow loris! The rangers are pretty limited in English though so heads-up if you go don’t expect full explanations of things or bring a translator (shout-out to our driver Chaiyong who joined us and translated!).

After a long day of wildlife, we checked into our glamping tent at Lala Mukha Tented Resort. This resort is very close to the park entrance and has a wide variety of tent options from basic (no in-tent bathroom) to the superior tent we booked, which even included a tub. It wasn’t the cheapest option (tents run from $50-200 USD depending on the option selected), but it was great for us after a long day!

On our final day in the area it poured all day – apparently our luck with the rain had run out! After all the leeches the day before we hadn’t planned to hike much anyway so we spent the day outside the national park. The area around the park is very focused on local tourists and much of it seems to imitate Europe (there’s even a place called Primo Piazza that’s mostly just Italian-looking photo ops!). We ended up avoiding some of the most gimmicky options and toured PB Winery and then went to Khao Yai Art Museum. The winery tour was nice, but I think my favorite of the day was the art museum. The gallery is small but features some great pieces by Thai artists and is worth a stop.

Khao Yai may not have gone as planned but it was a fun excursion to end our time in Thailand and replace Sumatra. We saw plenty of wildlife even in the rainy season…maybe next time we’ll get lucky enough to see a wild elephant!