Anyway...that's the best news of the year!
Ok, we had booked a tour of Khao Yai national park for the day and were picked up at 7:45 in a tuk tuk (for those of you who don't know what a tuk tuk is...think of a Ford Ranger small pickup, then adding a covered roof, and padded bench seat along the sides of the box..holds 8 people sitting..open along the sides and back. They're everywhere...... So off we went to the park. Khao Yai is huge...it's on the World Heritage site as one of the top national parks of the world..huge eco system. Covers over 6000 square kilometers and have wild elephants, tigers (Asia), black bear, leopard and other animals that will eat you for lunch. We stopped at a viewing pull off as soon as we got into the park and Colin and I found our forte right away...state of the art bench press bench with barbells...out in the open!!!
State of the art bench press!!
We then pulled off the road for a 3k hike out and back into the bush to a famous waterfall..made famous only because it was the waterfall filmed in the movie The Beach with Leonard di Caprio. Pretty cool waterfall. Colin of course had to strip and go swimming!
We had had a great lunch and then while we were all sitting at the waterfall, the guide came and got everyone and said to "hurry, hurry" as an elephant near the campground was coming out of the bush. So we all ran back to the tuk tuk and hightailed it down the road past the campground (with everyone stopped alongside the road telling us not to go any further as there was a wild elephant in the middle of the road ahead). Well, we got to this section of the road and there was all these trees beaten down, branches in the road and all and from my experiences on safari's in South Africa, I knew the elephant was still in the bush. All of a sudden, we hear this huge trumpet roar of this elephant and the damn thing comes charging out of the bush, stops just behind the truck in the bush and is shaking it's head back and forth and bellowing..pretty cool stuff until he comes breaking out of the bush and starts charging us!! One pissed off elephant...and a HUGE male at that!!!
Nice Elephant!!! So the driver moved ahead and would stop in the middle of the road and the elephant who was no more than 50 ft from us, would stand there and just roar with his trunk turned up, shake his head and then he'd start moving again. Finally, we moved further away (much to my disappointment) and the elephant went back into the bush. I don't know what I was thinking...but I didn't even use the movie on my digital camera to get it all on video...damn!!!Driving along the road, the guide spotted a Cameroon monkey so of course we stopped. The monkey loved it! He was like posing for us!!! Nice monkey....
We then started returning for the hotel when they spotted some kind of deer standing alongside someone's home...this thing had a HUGE rack!!!
That about wrapped up the day!!! Pretty awesome day...great day at the national park then just awesome news about becoming a Grandpa later on in the evening...just doesn't get much better than that!!!
Len
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