Friday, January 31, 2014 (Chinese New Year)
Got a bit of a late start, but it was only 35 km to San Phan Bok (or 3000 Holes’. Described as a rock formation on the Mekong resembling Swiss cheese and “you’ll feel as much like you’re visiting another planet as another country.” by the Lonely Planet. Well, it was nice but not another planet. Sterlin was able to drive over the rocks, in a dry part of the river bed, which was pretty cool.
San n Phan Bok was a side trip; the main event for the day was Pha Taem National Park. We found an appropriate waypoint in our GPS and headed off as directed. We didn’t actually check where we were going. As luck would have it, along the way we saw three Buddhas perched on a small mountain top, so turned off for a quick visit. Very impressive place, all this effort in the middle of nowhere. And again, not a monk to be seen. The onward road out of the village was blocked by a very large truck which was clearly not moving, but our trusty GPS showed us that we could get around the town, so we headed back the way we came to then continue further on that road. The ‘by-pass’ was pretty rough, high clearance and low-range required, but was only a few kilometers, so not to worry.
Well, the ‘by-pass’ rejoined the road, which turned out to be same dubious track we were on before. Now the waypoint was only 2.5 kms away; so we decided to venture on, bouncing along as we went. Another 2.5 kms and we found a walking track off to our waypoint, yet another 3.5 kms away. This was all getting a bit silly, but fortunately it was now only 9 kms along this track to the visitors’ center and a sealed road, so we gritted our teeth and continued along the road foregoing the earlier selected waypoint. The track got a little tricky in places, but nothing Sterlin wasn’t built for. This would have been a rather bad place to breakdown, specially since we hadn’t seen any other ‘traffic’ on the dirt road and were clearly out here by ourselves. Eventually the track turned into something as we approached the visitors’ center, which not only was closed but also completely empty. And there was no sealed road here either. The sealed road wasn’t far away, we could see it on our GPS and at the bottom of the cliffs! After a little sight-seeing, talking to the ranger who didn’t speak English, and, considering our options at that time of day (it was late afternoon) and quantity of food, we realized that it was better to stay the night than try and get back along the dirt road and then some. We hadn’t planned on camping, and we were a little disorganized, but we setup camp and made the best of it. There was no one else around, so we had the entire campground to ourselves. Dinner was a pot of yogurt and two breakfast bars each.
Turned out our campground was located at Cha Na Dai Cliff which is the most easterly point in Thailand and, consequently, is the first place in Thailand that sees the sunrise. So we set the alarm for 5:30am and made great plans to get up and be the first people in Thailand to see the sunrise.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Alarm went off. And after some humming and harring we did eventually drag ourselves out of bed and walked 15 minutes to the sunrise viewing point. It was worth it, as we were greeted with a lovely sunrise. The other benefit was that we were in the car and heading back by 7:30am, very early for us.
