ม3 Trip – Christmas Day

Christmas day opened with a breakfast of fried eggs, ham, toast, hot dogs, and fried rice. Breakfast finished we piled into the tour bus. Our first stop (which came after a good deal of driving) was the longest dam in Thailand. I’m not entirely sure why we bothered to drive there. Sure a three mile long dam is a challenge to build, but all there was to see of it was a long, low, narrow hill with a road on top of it. There were people sitting at turnstalls to collect a bathroom usage fee.

That took up most of the morning, but on our way to lunch (back close to where we started) we made a fun stop at a sunflower field.

We ate lunch at the Chokchai farm steak house. The picture below says “Happy New Year 2552” (the current Thai year is 2551).

After lunch we swung by a vineyard, and tasted some grape juice.

We then went to Khao Yai National Park. Khao Yai is the first, and I believe the largest national park in Thailand. On our way into the park we transitioned from the tour bus to five pickup trucks.

On our way through the park we saw a lot of monkeys along the road.

Our main stop in the park was a waterfall. It was good to get out of the vehicles and do some walking. I was getting quite tired of sitting down.

We wrapped up with night time spotlight tour of a small section of the park. Apparently elephants can often be seen. Tigers are rarely seen. There are some funky buffalo sorts of things that wander around to. We mainly just saw deer. We did see a baby deer and an angry mother.