The next morning I hopped a bus to Soppong and from there
I hired a motorcycle to drive me 9 kilometres up a dirt road to a cave
I'd read about.
I checked into a guesthouse by the river at the edge of the park and
hired a guide and lantern. The river winds through the park a ways
before entering the gaping maw of Tham Lot cave.
The first chamber is
about 200 meters wide with a ceiling about 5 stories up. Huge. The
tour simply goes past all the interesting rock formations that have
signs for the tourists in front of them. A bridge inside allows you
to cross the river, and theres a section of rocky beach nearby where
the locals hang out by the light of a small lantern and wait for
people to hire their bamboo rafts to go down the river (through the
cave). I didn't bother.
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Spiders everywhere
After the tour I hiked around the mountain to
where the river exits from a similarly large chamber. Along the way I
heard this sound like leaves blowing in the wind, but felt no breeze. I
stopped walking and the noise stopped. I took a step and heard it
again from the leaves on both sides of the path. I leaned over to
look at the leaves and realized they were covered in spiders.
Thousands of these things that look like Daddy-Long-Legs were
scurrying away from me whenever I moved. Having such thin-legs and
small bodies they were hard to see at first, but I noticed now that
they covered everything. The leaves, the bushes, the trees and rocks.
Everywhere I went within about a 1 kilometer radius was swarming with
spiders. Sometimes I wonder if Thailand has an unspoken monopoly on
weird-shit. Like if maybe other countries just stop by periodically
to borrow a cup of "what the fuck?!"
At the centre of all the spider madness was a stone staircase that ran
up to the side of the mountain. At the top of the stairs was what
appeared to be a cave entrance but with an 8-foot high concrete wall
around it and a padlocked door in the center. Through cracks in
the door I could see some kind of delapidated buddhist shrine. And
despite the fact the spiders were fleeing in droves from the stairs as
I came up them, there was not a single one on the wall or the door.
I sure would love to know what the heck all that was about.
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Birds flying into the cave after sunset
About a hundred meters past the spider kingdom was the cave where
the river exits. The cave floor was covered in bat and bird shit and
stank to high heaven. This spot was supposed to provide quite a
spectacle at sunset when thousands of birds would fly in to sleep and
thousands of bats would fly out to hunt. So I stayed until sunset and
for close to 2 hours watched the birds fly in. At a rate of about
20-30 birds flying in per second I figure there must be close to
two-hundred-thousand of them living in there. But I never did see any bats
come out and finally gave up at around 8 o'clock, when I marched back
to camp with some Israeli tourists who'd also been waiting for the
bats.
I hitched a ride back to Soppong this morning and rented a cabin
up in the hills about a kilometer south of town. Then I hiked over to
the neighbouring town of Pangmapha where the post office has a computer
terminal that runs off of phone cards. This thing is the ugliest damn
computer I've ever seen.
Scott
