I arrived in Pak Chong by 2:30. The fellow from the Greenleaf Guesthouse had advised me to be there by three, but I still faced the problem of contacting the guesthouse so that they could come and get me. I managed to get all of my gear off of the bus and onto my back. I was agonizing over trying to find a payphone that probably would not work for me anyway when I heard an Australian voice say, “My God, that is a huge pack.” I told him that it had to be enough for four months. He pointed to his small duffle and said, “this is enough for me for six months.” I said that he must know a lot more laundresses than I do, or something stupid like that…. I had to find a phone. He said, “you just buy new clothes if you need them. They are so cheap here.” Now I was getting irritated and I started to rant about how small Thai women were and how it was impossible for me to find clothes that fit when he asked me if I had someplace to stay, “because someone from the Greenleaf Guesthouse is coming to pick me up and if you were in need of accommodations….” Instantly, all was forgiven.
The Australian voice belonged to a 62-year old fashion design teacher from Perth, who sort of reminded me of Richard Attenborough. Sir Richard and I exchanged biographies on the way to the Greenleaf in the back of the sawngthaew (a pick-up truck with two benches running down the side). As it turns out he was a birder. A birder who liked to photograph birds, keep lists of birds that he had seen, and talk about birds at length whether the other person involved in the conversation was interested or not. Despite this and my annoyance at our first meeting, I liked Sir Richard.
Upon our arrival, the leader of the half-day trek said that they would be leaving in 10 minutes if we wanted to get in on the tour. I didn’t really want to go. I wasn’t fully recovered from my walk in the park earlier, but this guesthouse was not a resort where you relax by the pool or read a smutty novel in a deck chair. The rooms were designed for the trekker who wanted a place to collapse after a long day of outdoor activity. I agreed to join the tour and off we went to the cave. The cave was on the grounds of a monastery and the guide told us that the monks frequently used the caves for meditation. We saw a tarantula, a centipede and a few bats. Quite honestly, I did not know what was included in the half day trek, even though I had read about it in my travel guide. Someone said something about a bat cave. I was unimpressed and I was thinking about what I was going to have for dinner. Now when I start obsessing about food it is hard to pull me off of that track, but when we got there the guide trained a spyglass on the cave opening where the bats fly out and you could see dozens and dozens of bats flying inside of the cave. It was about 30 minutes before sunset. He said that the bats wake up and start flying around to warm up for their evening flight. I asked how many bats were in there and he said around two million. Someone asked how long it took for all of the bats to come out. The guide said about an hour. As we eagerly awaited the bats, so did the birds of prey who gathered around the cave opening to snag an evening meal. It started with just a few at first, but soon it was like a cloud of smoke was swirling out of the cave. The flight patterns were something incredible to witness, first they made a funneling pattern and then a pattern that swooped in our direction. The birds of prey would fly in circles just above the bats and in the blink of an eye go into a dive to pluck an unlucky bat from the swarm.
At first I was amazed and delighted, but after 40 minutes or so I started to think about food again. If only I had had an occupation, but doggone it! The batteries on my camera were dead. I missed some good photo ops, maybe Sir Richard could hook me up. The sun set and there were no more animals to see so we headed back to the guesthouse, finally I could get something to eat! Our guide for the trek was also our waiter back at the guesthouse. He asked me what I wanted and I asked him what was the fastest. He said, “tofu and vegetables.” I told him that sounded great. I got tofu and vegetables with a hair in it. I wonder how much longer it would have taken to get tofu and vegetables without the hair.
