Day 646 - Heading for the hills

This morning we left Sukhothai, albeit a lot later than planned due to the rain clouds that dampened us on our walk to breakfast and the forecast of storms threatening our national park expedition, and headed for Nam Nao. As we drank coffee while waiting for the bus, we had the company of a couple of girls who took a break from their swings to look at the pictures in our guidebook and play simple games with us.

Nam Nao National Park in the Northeast of Thailand is not one of Thailand's more famous parks, which is part of the reason we decided to head there! Our bus dropped us off on the side of the highway where we began our walk towards the camping area - this walk was cut short when a couple of rangers offered us space in the back of their ute, saving us a 2km walk. The set up at this park is pretty amazing - there are loos and bucket showers all over the camping area, kept remarkably clean considering those using them are hiking through mud all day! There are bungalows for hire, but they are more for those with bulging wallets, so we opted for the 250 baht option of hiring a tent complete with sleeping bags and ground rolls (if you have your own tent it's only 30 baht per person to camp). When we arrived it was immediately clear that we were elevated, as it was much much colder than in Sukhothai, so before we went to one of the small restaurants for dinner we donned our merinos for the first time in a while - it's almost nice to be cold for a change!! At dinner our charade conversations continued as we successfully managed to convey that we wanted noodles - one with meat and one without!

During dinner darkness descended upon the national park and our thoughts drifted to the adventures we'd have exploring tomorrow in this 1000sq km park where 3 rivers originate and wild animals supposedly wait to be gazed upon!

Adlibing it into nature.