Our next main stop was again a national park. Khao yai national park is the oldest (1962) of 127 national parks in Thailand. It is also one of the most popular ones due to its closeness to Bangkok. It is quite big though, covering more than 2000 km2. Even though it has several hiking trails, it feels like it is rather made for people having a car, coming by during the day to stop at some viewpoints.

Going there

As we didn’t have a car, we arrived there by shared songtaew, they dropped us off at the entrance of the park, but the way to the visitor center was about 17km of steep asphalt road. So we had no other choice but to hitchhike, fortunately, we could easily hop on the cargo part of one of the many SUVs passing by:

We hitchhiked most of the time to reach our bungalows or the hiking routes and discovered that to go in the back of a truck in a forest, is actually a quite fun way of traveling!

What we did

Animal seeing

The park is home to a wide variety of wildlife, including elephants, boars, deers, and over 300 species of birds. One needs to be quite lucky to spot one of the bigger animals and would definitely not want to encounter one while hiking. We saw some hornbills, bulbul, porcupines, deer, and finally one elephant in nature (from a distance)!

Here are some playing deers in the small river near the center:

Hiking!

The hiking routes are amazing. These are going through the jungle and some waterfalls. We were mostly the only people hiking, therefore felt all alone in the wildlife accompanied by the voices of various birds, insects, and sometimes - we guess - monkeys. It was amazing!

There were nice views of some open fields:

And a waterfall

What was the most striking to us was how dense the forest was:

We could also see the canopy being dominated by extremely tall trees, it felt like a city of some sort!

We could see many of the trunks of these trees while walking:

The only downside was the leeches, especially after the rain. After getting bitten by lots of them on the first day, we bought some anti-leech socks and solved that problem as well!