The Himmapaan Foundations first tree planting ceremony is enthusiastically received. With the enthusiastic support of locals, volunteers, students and government officials, the first tree planting ceremony of the Himmapaan Foundation marked an impressive start for an innovative reforestation project.
Visitors tell some wild stories about Khao Yai National Park, like seeing jackals chasing down a deer, like herds of elephants lumbering down the main road, like gibbons performing high-wire circus acts up in the rainforest’s big top and, during a night safari, seeing a Malayan porcupine waddling along the roadside.
The monkey scampered down a power pole and scurried past a convenience store, a gold shop, and a tailor. Then it snuck into a Chinese pharmacy. Behind the counter, the macaque snatched several bottles of cough medicine off the shelf and ran back outside, where it drank one of the bottles. Several minutes later, the monkey fell asleep on the street. A car swerved around it, narrowly averting a head-on collision with a motorcycle, but ran over its tail.
With a long, bamboo pole I’m stabbing at a nest of red ants high up in the branches of a mango tree. As the pole pierces the nest, a few of them rain down on me. They’re huge and they sting my hands and arms with their bites. Where I come from, ants can ruin a picnic by forming a freight train to raid the potato salad. But that’s about it. They do not look like they just crawled in from the set of a sci-fi movie. Nor do they bite.
We’re sitting around a fire inside a house of thatched bamboo up in a Lahu village in northern Thailand. Across the leaping flames, the middle-aged medicine man of this village of 100 households is telling our guide why the Lahu do not hunt gibbons.
When people think of Koh Lanta they envisage sandy beaches, a turquoise sea and soft sand. But Lanta is not only that. We chartered a tour with the Swedish tour operator, on a full day ‘Unknown Lanta’ trip by minivan. I was contemplating the long Klong Dao stretch of beach, as a glorious sun was rising from behind Lanta’s backbone mountains striking joggers and roaming dogs, when Man, our guide for the day, appeared at the reception of the resort I was staying at. Man is a nice guy from Koh Lanta who loves smiling and has 7 years experience in the tourist sector. Along with the young driver called Sayyan, he was to make sure my day was full of discoveries.
Phang Nga Bay’s spectacular limestone scenery has been an inspiration of film makers, writers and romantics for decades. Dozens of picturesque islands rise up from the Andaman Sea, their tree-clad cliffs casting a rainbow of contrast to the bay’s sparkling azure sea.
Lanna was the name of a prosperous kingdom that occupied Northern Thailand and parts of present day Myanmar and Laos. Founded in the 13th century, the name means ‘Land of a million rice fields’.
The rich culture and history owe much to the influence of Burma and, to a certain extent Laos. As a result, Lanna is rather different from other regions of Thailand, especially in cuisine, culture and custom
By day, you trek through the richly forested Kaeng Krachan National Park on the lookout for hornbills and gibbons, cleansing your lungs and rejuvenating your senses with sunlight and smog-free air. Around sunset, you wash away all that sweat with a swim in the ocean, and later, there’s a safari to spot nocturnal species such as elephants, leopards and wild cattle. The next day, you could find yourself encircling an island where macaques scamper along the shoreline, sea eagles arc through the sky, and bottlenose dolphins plow through the waves.
