p a s s i o n + r e a s o n

Phu Kra Dung is Thailand's second largest national park. Situated in Loei province, due north of Bangkok an eight hour drive, it's a high plateau. If you think of a mountain with a good part of its top lopped off cleanly across, that's Phu Kra Dung. Our office took a couple days and a weekend off for this office "field trip" along with some friends of a colleague. It's an arduous 6 hour trek up to the top, however, ascending 1833 metres and 9 km laterally. Well, it's arduous for us fat cats who ascend and descend the mountain with the help of porters lugging all of our stuff. The only non-fat cats were the porters and a very small handful of hard-core (or extremely poor) students. These porters carried some 50-70 kg of campers' bags balanced on the ends of a large bamboo pole. Here we struggle up the mountain without our 10 kg packs, usually reaching the top after our porters. (Those numerous snack huts at the various resting points slow us down considerably.) I might've heard something that it is a true stereotype that Thai people do not excercise. Except for Su, our colleague who organized the trip - she can hike about anyone to shreds.

After the exhausting day hiking up the mountain, we woke up the next day before dawn and hiked about 1 km to see the sunrise. It was beautiful. Then we hiked back to our camp for breakfast. After lunch we hiked all the heck around the park - to catch sunset. That must've been 20+ km. We watched the sunset. It was beautiful. Then we hiked all the heck back to camp. I now have a deeper admiration, respect, and understanding of the hell the Eco-Challenge contestants go through. Feet oozing with puss (and fungus in those climates) and screaming for you to quit are very, very hard to ignore. I didn't experience that kind of hell, but I was pretty sore and tired for a couple days afterwards.

The beauty all around me was a true worship experience. From African savannah plains and lush rainforests to breathtaking cliffs and intricate waterfall networks, the terrain is amazingly diverse. I'm not sure if there are any other places where you can naturally find conifers (evergreen trees) in the same area as tall deciduous trees. The area around us is sparsely populated, so there is very little light pollution, allowing you to clearly see the stars.

One big problem was the stupid deer. They are so used to human contact that they brazenly rummage through your campsite at night, looking for food. Since our group had lots of food that couldn't be put in our tents, we were awoken several times at night with deer trashing our food stores. I had to charge at one a couple of times before going back to sleep. My evil twin tells me to bring a paintball gun next time.

One funny thing is how much the Thai people got decked out in warm weather gear. Think Canadian wind-chill gear: toque, mitts, scarves, fleece. All because at night it drops to an unthinkably cold low of 15 degrees Celcius.

Nevertheless, this was definitely an experience to remember.

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