...those 16 days... khao yai

hey guys.. i am finally back in spore!! did u guys miss me? hahaz... YEP is fun!!! it is a totally brand new experience for me. i am starting to miss everything there. the thai people esp my buddy and mr cool, the school (DEKRAKPHA), khao yai national park, the toilets without a flushing system, bathing late at night, my dearest bunk mates, the newly formed NJ gossip club and many many more....


i spent my first 3 days at khao yai national park. it is a tourist attraction and a nature reserve. its area is like 3 to 4 times the size of spore. omg.. that's very HUGE. it covers about 7 provinces in thailand. we slept in tents for the first night and it was freezing cold. i actually wore long sleeve, track pants, socks and covered myself with 2 blankets to sleep. i was shivering when i woke up at 5am (thailand time). one of my bunk mates, maha actually covered herself with the blankets when she went to the toilets to wash up. hahaz.. damn funny.


we were deleted into 3 differet groups and had 3 different activities over a period of 3 days. each group has 2 thai guides, one of which is mr cool. hahaz... my first day was nature walk and the study of hornbills. we went into the forest to get as close to the animals as possible. though we were supposed to study about hornbills, we din spot any that day. =( instead, many leeches found their way up to our hands. leeches are a type of insect that feed on human blood. and they will grow in size while sucking ur blood. they move forward by curling themselves up. i think they look like earthworms. we also saw some gibbons. they look like monkey with a tail. they said gibbon belongs to the ape family. the terrain was horrible. it was so damn steep and we had to hold on to one another or the trees for support. we soaked our legs into a river and had lunch. so cool... after eating, i attempted to draw some birds of thailand. the other thai guide, P Tock, came and taught me how to draw. no matter how ugly my drawing was he would say beautiful or very nice. what a nice guy right? he could not speak english very well so we had to communicate in simple eng and thai and body lang. =)


the second day was awesome. we played a blindfold game at the start of the trail. when we removed our blindfold, what we saw was a shockingly beautiful landscape. we were standing on a cliff and we were way taller than the highest layer of the forest.we saw trees and trees and more trees.. the mountains and everything. it was like woah.... the best part of the second day was the visit to a real waterfall. i had nv seen one in my entrie life before i went on the trip. in the end, we could not visit the most magnificant one in the national park cos the princess of japan was there and she was touring around the park too. so outsiders could not enter. so sad... in the end, we went to a smaller waterfall instead. it was equally cool too. we jumped into the water and swam. cool... the rocks were so damn slippery that i slipped and fell quite a few times. clumsy me...


the last activity was the most slack and boring of all. it was the bird watching. it was just walking and more walking and seeing birds and more birds and stretching the birds and blah blah... nothing exciting about the activity. i was impressed by the thai people because they know all the facts about the nature like the birds, plants and insects at their fingertips. they all can draw very well too. when they spot a bird, they will immediately take up some papers and a pen and start drawing. and their drawings are very realistic esp those drew by mr cool.


our night activities at khao yai were to learn some simple thai. but i could only rmb those that are used to scold pple. hahaz.. besides attenting thai language lessons, we had painting and drawing classes too. we either touched up on the drawings that we drew in the day or asked the thai people to draw our protrait for us. the last night there was writing autographs and more autographs. we actually stayed very late that night to ask the translater to translate the thai messages that they wrote in our books to english.


after touring at khao yai for 3 days, we were off to DEKRAKPHA (children love forest) school to organize 2 camps and a sports carnival. it is time for the 29 of us to work... =)