It's a Jungle out There...

After my first full week of volunteering, feeling mentally and physically exhausted, a few of us girls decided to take a break from it all and get away for the weekend. We left for Khao Yai National Park after work on Friday, a three and a half hour bus ride from Bangkok and were then picked up in the back of a ute and taken to our hostel. We arrived about 10pm and decided to get some sleep for an early start in the morning... didn't sleep much though! Was freeeezing cold up in the mountains and none of us really brought warm clothes thinking Thailand is always hot haha... well its not... and there were frogs and ducks and no blankets to make our night more adventurous... 

Breakfast at 7am and then we were off on our day tour. We were fortunate enough to pay a tenth of the cost due to the fact that we were volunteers!

We saw gibbons (and heard them! bunch of noisy animals they are) 

This was our form of transportation for the day 

Alice another volunteer and myself getting excited

Another gibbon 

The first part of the tour was out in some grass plains, we spotted monkeys, gibbons and a few great hornbills, they are huge!

We then (with our lovely leech socks) were taken further into the "jungle" to begin our three hour trek in search of wildlife... and elephants! 

First animal we saw (other than the million monkeys that were everywhere!) was a snake. Quite cute compared to the ones we have back home... 

So we spent the morning walking through the jungle... falling in mud... and hearing wild elephants close by. Was a rush of excitement to see tree tops moving in the distance due to wild elephants. We came really close during the day but didn't see an elephant up close in the wild till the evening and it was too dark to take a decent photo, and my camera died. But the trek was filled with laughs of girls discovering lovely insects, webs, spiders, falling over, sticky coconut rice pudding in banana leaves and other fun things in the jungle... 

And then look what the tour guide found... He decided it would be funny to put a scorpion on my face. I have never been so scared in my life! EEEEEEK

Was actually half crying and half laughing telling him to get it off and he thought it was hilarious! not funny...

We all had a turn having it on us, they were lucky to have it on their back and shoulders

 The boys weren't as brave haha

We then sat down at a lookout and had sweet and sour chicken. After lunch we drove for about half an hour to check out some waterfalls. On the walk down we saw another snake. This one was quite camouflage  

Group shot of us CCD girls who went for the weekend. Myself, Alice, Bekky, Emily and Camille 

One of the waterfalls... 

Timer shot in front of another waterfall 

acting normal haha...

My camera then decided to die... We spent the rest of the day driving through the national park in search of elephants and checking out a couple more waterfalls. We finally saw an elephant in the wild, was so exciting and a little scary, thought it might charge at me with its massive tusks. 

There were literally thousands of monkeys everywhere! Was hard not to run them over and i have quite a few photos of them haha... The tour ended at  7pm and we were dropped off at the bus stop to take the 8pm bus back to Bangkok. I slept the whole trip home and now about to get some more sleep. Have the whole day tomorrow to relax before getting back to work on monday. Looking forward to writing about the children next week. 

Stay Tuned Xx