I finally had the chance to see how the other half lives on my train ride from Ayutthaya to Pak Chong. Ahhh… Second Class! The elderly woman who ran my guesthouse in Ayutthaya seemed so overly concerned I would end up on the wrong, expensive train — but it was a nice excursion for me. And only about twice the price as 3rd Class (and still hardly anything by Western standards). It was about the same standard of service you’d expect from Amtrak with roomy, reclining seats and air-conditioned carriages. Unlike Amtrak, however, we also had cabin boys repeatedly sweeping and mopping below our feet. It was a nice way to spend a leisurely 3 hours riding up into the mountains of eastern central Thailand.
My wildlife safari operators were waiting for me patiently at the train station, having come earlier thinking I was on another train. Our late-afternoon/evening tour was starting in only an hour after my arrival. They whisked me on to their guesthouse in the country outside of town where I took the opportunity to grab what I needed for the first part of the safari.
The safari was split over two days. The first day’s tour actually took place outside of the park, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. There was a cool refreshing mountain spring to swim in, a Buddhist temple to visit (there’s an original idea!), and most interestingly, bat caves to check out.
It seems Buddhist monks have taken over a lot of the easily accessible caves in Thailand for meditation purposes. One such cave we visited near a Wat had a handful of small bats hanging from the ceiling, just up above the imported Buddhist shrines. But the really cool bat caves were a bit too remote for us to go inside.
One particular cave on top of a big rugged hill was estimated to have over a million bats in it. Just after sunset each night, the million bats would habitually file out in a huge cloud heading into the wind before dispersing in their hunt for the evening’s feed of flying insects. It was absolutely amazing to watch this seemingly endless cloud of bats swarm out of their cave and off into the sunset for a good half hour. We didn’t hang around much after dark, but we were told the stream lasted around full ninety minutes.
