I've Been to the Bat Cave!

With Doris in Austin, I decided to take a trip by myself this weekend to Khao Yai National Park, Thailand's largest, which is located about a two-hour drive from Bangkok. I wasn't actually "by myself," since our driver, Khun Akkachai, took me there and was my friendly companion while touring the park. He proved to be an invaluable resource in many ways, including translating from Thai to English. One can get by speaking English (accompanied by plenty of arm waving to give charades-like clues) in the area in which I live in Bangkok, but in most other parts of Thailand, proficiency in Thai is essential to communication.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Bat Cave. I was skeptical that it would live up to its advance billing, but it actually far exceeded my expectations. We're not talking about the residence of the Caped Crusader here but a cave in which roughly 4 million bats reside and from which they emerge every evening at dusk. About an hour before sunset, I hired a guide and drove to the base of the mountain in which the cave is located. As you can see from the pictures, we parked in a farmer's sugar cane field and waited.

As the sun began dipping towards the horizon and I was snapping photos of yet another sunset (I've surely taken enough of these over the years, but who can resist?), a stream of bats suddenly started pouring out of the mountainside. For those of you who have high-speed internet connections, I'm inserting a short video of this remarkable phenomenon. For those who don't, I'm posting a few still pictures. So, okay, I've taken too many sunset photos over the years, but these are the first showing swarms of bats in the foreground.

Incredibly, this river of bats kept pouring out of the cave, even as we were leaving the farmer's field in the dark about 45 minutes later. The guide told us that it takes about two hours for all 4 million bats to exit in an orderly manner. I'm not so sure about orderly . I can only imagine what it must be like in the cave itself, with all these creatures flapping and jockeying for position at the opening. Once they're out of the cave, the bats head off in search of their meals of insects and have been known to travel well over a hundred miles before returning one-by-one to the cave before sunrise. This assumes they aren't nabbed by hungry Thais. Our guide told us that residents in the area love to snack on bat meat roasted with garlic.

Other highlights of the trip:

-- encountering a huge lizard—about four feet long—on the road while driving through the park. Unfortunately, he moved so fast, despite his size, that all the photos I took of him before he scampered into the brush were blurry.

-- meeting a family of wild elephants by the side of the road (there are about 250 altogether in the park):

-- hiking to a large waterfall that required climbing up and down the steepest and narrowest stairs I've ever seen at a tourist attraction anywhere in the world:

-- finding a group of other tourists peering into the jungle at the side of the path to the waterfall and taking pictures. At first I couldn't see what they were photographing, so they had to point out the huge tarantula—the size of a man's hand—idling the time away in his web:

Before getting to the waterfall, we encountered yet another tarantula at a different location, likewise waiting patiently in his web, perhaps for an unsuspecting tourist to wander off the beaten path. These sightings only reinforced my reluctance to do more hiking in the park. Materials that I read in preparation for my visit recommended the wearing of "leech socks" to prevent leeches from securing themselves to one's ankles and sucking blood. I mentioned this to Khun Akkachai, who demonstrated a very relaxed attitude in reply. "Mister, I not scared. Leeches need blood, so I don't mind. I help them." Good for him, but I can’t fathom having the same attitude. Also, I have a friend in Bangkok who is recovering from dengue fever, a tropical disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and can cause spasms so severe that a victim's bones sometimes break. With this in mind, I decided to stick to only the more well-developed paths in the park and avoid getting too adventurous.

One more thing: there's marble beneath the ground, and sometimes above the ground, in Khao Yai. Lots of it. Trucks haul enormous pieces of the stone, chewing up the roads and creating large potholes that we drove through. There is so much marble in the area that the owner of the hotel I stayed in went wild with the stuff. I'm posting a couple of pictures of my room, showing a marble floor, a marble counter in the living area (the bed’s mattress also rested on marble), and a bathroom made almost entirely of marble. The owner apparently drew the line at installing a marble toilet.

There’s so much marble in the area that the owner even arranged to have a square piece of art work hung on the wall, comprised entirely of—you guessed it—marble: