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Khao Sok
| Southern Thailand's best inland destination |
Introduction
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Khao Sok National Park is the largest area of virgin rain-forest in southern Thailand, thanks to the inadvertent efforts of a group of communist guerrillas.
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Between 1975 and 1982 radical ex-students not only kept the Thai military at bay, they also kept out the loggers, miners and hunters who were threatening the region’s ecology.
Shortly after their insurgency fizzled out in 1982, the Thai government passed strict anti-logging laws.
Had it not been for the communist students’ seven year occupation, Khao Sok’s forests may well have gone the same way as much of the rest of Thailand’s wilderness – up in smoke.
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Khao Sok National Park’s 739 square kilometers of virgin rainforest include spectacular waterfalls cascading down vertiginously towering limestone cliffs, complex cave systems and primeval jungle trails.
Most visitors explore the park on elephant-back, canoe or trekking day trips from resorts in the Khao Sok Visitor’s Centre, a small resort village near the park’s entrance.
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In 1982 the nearby Paseng river was dammed in order to generate hydroelectric power, creating the huge and wonderfully atmospheric Cheow Larn Lake, 1 hour’s drive away from the resorts at the Khao Sok Visitor’s Centre.
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Together, Khao Sok National Park and Cheow Larn Lake are currently southern Thailand’s best inland soft adventure destination, by a mile, offering the region’s best trekking, rafting, elephant trekking, tubing, canoeing and camping. |
Visitors can either explore the park and lake on day-trips from Khao Lak or from the resorts in the Khao Sok Visitor Centre, or they can stay in or near the lake, either in tents or in the lake’s hugely popular floating bamboo bungalows.
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The park and lake form a great soft adventure destination for couples and for families. Families with smaller children are advised against staying overnight, and to explore on day-trips while based in one of the resorts in Khao Lak or in Khao Sok’s Visitor Centre.
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For those who don’t mind roughing it a bit, a good way to see the lake is by joining a 2- or 3-day tour which combines foot trekking with canoeing, rafting and longtail boat exploration of the lake. The tents and floating bungalows are clean but very basic, and have very thin mattresses. |
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If you have time, choose a 3-day tour in order to spend more time at the stunning Cheow Larn Lake, which is arguably the most beautiful place in southern Thailand. |
After sleeping like a baby, rocked by the gentle swells of the lake on which your bungalow floats, you awaken to the territorial cries of gibbons in the canopy above (unlike the one in this image, who is pals with one of Khao Sok's daftest dogs and prefers sleeping indoors these days).
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The surrounding hills are often covered in an atmospheric mist which, as it is slowly melted by the rising sun, is suffused with subtle shades of pink and amber.
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Species diversity is high in Khao Sok.
The number of different fauna present in the fossil record increased markedly during the last ice age, when sea levels fell to such an extent that new land bridges formed from the Malaysian mainland to Borneo and to some of the Indonesian islands.
This opened up new migration routes to land-based animals.
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Can you stop the lizard hidden in the jungle image on the left ? |
Wildlife
Kao Sok Tours
Khao Sok Resorts
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