The Jungle

We left the islands. It had to happen at some point, I guess. After all the drinking and doing nothing, Jesse and I decided to head straight into the jungle and sweat out the last week. We went to Khaosok National Park in Thailand, halfway between the east and west coasts. It's one of the oldest rainforests in the world (160 million years old), one of the biggest, and one of the last remaining homes to wild elephants, tigers, leopards, and bears. Also, the world's largest flower is found here, the only place it can be found actually. We came too late to see it bloom, but when it does it has been described as smelling like a rotting corpse.
Well, we didn't see any of it, the flowers or the animals. That was somewhat disappointing to us until we realized that it probably wouldn't be a good thing had we encountered any large mammals anyways. But we did see a lot, heard a lot, and smelled a lot.
The first night there, we found this exotic looking tree frog just hanging out on the curtains of our room--it was lime green with long legs and orange, suction-cup toes. Jesse and I were little girls about it, arguing over who should do what about getting it out of the room. We ended up using a plastic bag to shimmy it out, then slamming the door and sighing with relief.
We went on two hikes, the first one along a river--grueling and long without enough water--the second serene and eery through the densest bamboo jungle, so wet it felt like your soul was sweating. We didn't see many animals, like I said, but you could feel them out there. Bird cries serenaded us the whole time, some sounding like yelps, others like flutes, and then some that sounded like wind-up toys--and this all probably came from the same bird. We even heard some velociraptor rumblings. Also, the trees sounded like they were seething or quietly screaming. I'm not sure what it was, but maybe or probably insects of some wild kind.
The only animals we saw were lizards, and we encountered a lot of them. Mostly small but all exotic to our eyes. Some were green, others grey--all had extremely long tails. Miniature dinosaurs. And at the end of our second hike, I heard a yelp from Jesse ahead of me--he had just witnessed a long snake (maybe 2.5 meters) too thick to get one hand around....we walked hurriedly after that.
Both hikes ended at waterfalls with swimming holes. We spent awhile at both swimming and eating our lunch of raisins and peanuts. Each time swimming I emerged with a leech on my leg, and both times it led to Jesse and I frantically searching in our shorts for a colony of them. It was the first time I've ever had a leech on me, so that was exciting.
The smells, too. At times it was sweet like candy, other times it smelled like you would imagine earth to smell like--green, brown, and heavy. Sometimes like almonds, others like jasmine, and still others like Jesse. I said it felt like your soul was sweating, well it also smelled like the ground was sweating.
Jesse lost about 3 pairs of sandals during our time on the islands and he had discarded his shoes somewhere in Vietnam, I think. It had been a week since he had any footwear and the duct tape covering his toes are evidence of that. Just before we got on a bus out to the forest, he rushed out to buy shoes and the biggest he could find were a US size 9 1/2 which won't even fit me comfortably. And you could probably guess they weren't of the best quality either. These were what he hiked in. The first day 18 km and the second 10km. He was spending a good hour and a half each day just tending to his feet--neosporin, bandaids, ducttape, rubbing and crying. He made it though and I'm proud of him (he finally found some sandals that fit him here in Kuala Lampur (Malaysia)).
I didn't take many pictures, and the ones I did just don't do the place justice. The scenery was too full, too complex, too wild to capture within a box frame. It might be saying something about my photography, but I think it says more about the place (with emphasis on "think"; see also: "hope"). It was beautiul and we only brushed the surface.
Right now, we're back on pavement in the capitol of Malaysia, the site of our next story.

P.S. Even though the pictures might not be the greatest, I'll post some of them....but the internet cafe I'm at has their CD drive bolted shut....next time....I promise.