~thailand/khao_sok/jungle_boogie

Khao Sok. Khao Sok. What a place. What a wonderful, magical place. I dont think words can describe how much i enjoyed Khao Sok, but i will try. (Justin, Jason - this blog is dedicated to you)

In brief, Khao Sok is a jungle. A hugemongous, big-ass jungle. We travelled there by ferry, then a couple of buses and finally arrived in the jungle about 5 days ago. We had heard from Aloy and Martine that a guesthouse called the Art's Riverview Guesthouse is THE place to stay.

We were dropped off at by the bus outside a guesthouse called Jungle Hut's, where we were greeted by a, what can only be described at horizontally challenged, thai chap who tried his best to get everyone to stay at his place. When we insisted we wanted to stay at Art's Riverview, he started saying evil lies like "its miles away", "road is very bad", "very expensive", "mine better", "no taxi will go there", "my truck cannot go on the roads", "its 2.5km away!".... all of which was lies. As soon as i started talking the language of money, his truck all of a sudden, miraculously could handle the roads well. 2.5km turned out to be 500metres, and the roads were fine!

So glad we kept our resolve. Art's Riverview has to be the best guesthouse in the world ever. Apart from the river running through it, the restaurant built out of wood and bamboo and muli levelled and built on stilts, the people being some of the most fun and genuinely friendly Thai's we have met, it was the best accomodation i've stayed in.

(!superlative overuse alert!)

For starters, we stayed in a cute wooden bungalow........... in a tree!!! That's right, it was a freakin' tree house! Can you believe it? We arrived late at night, so we couldnt see the place. We had only dim torches. We had to walk in the jungle to get to it (insects crawling everwhere), cross our very own, and very unstable under my gargantuan weight, bridge, up a series of ladders, and into our tree house 30 ft off the ground.

It wasnt til the morning that we realised how spectacular the place looked. There were rivers all around and under the house, trees everywhere, we really where in a tree. I really could have stayed there for weeks, swinging in a hammock high up in the trees. It didnt rain once the whole 3 days we were there, and we both fell in love with the jungle. I hope the photos do it justice.