KAENG KRACHAN NATIONAL PARK
(This turned into a much longer post than intended, so make sure your chair is comfy and your coffee pot full. When I went to post it I couldn't because the count was more than 20,000 characters, so I've broken it into two sections).
I landed in Bangkok at 4am in the morning. There was some mild consternation as I came up to immigration and saw the visa-on-arrival scrum. New Zealanders (and the citizens of most other civilised nations) have always got an automatic free 30-day visa stamp when they arrive in Thailand by air. You don't need anything, you just walk up to the immigration desk, they stamp your passport, and you're away. This time I saw a big sign by the visa-on-arrival area stating the need for onward tickets, proof of funds, proof of hotel booking - all the sorts of things I did not have at all - with an "as of December 2016" declaration and a statement that it costs 2000 Baht. There was a crowd of people pushing and shoving, as is the way in Asia, all trying to get their documents noticed and get through the door. I scanned down the list of countries by the door. No New Zealand. I asked the girl at the desk and she said it didn't affect me. Access as usual for me then. Whew. It was only for a strange mix of nineteen Asian and European countries like Bulgaria, Cyprus and Lithuania. (See here for the list if you're interested:
Visa on Arrival | ThaiEmbassy.com ).
I noticed when leaving Thailand a bit later that they've modified the border-run rules too, with a declaration that as of December 2016 only two land crossings are allowed within one calendar year. I can't really see that being upheld.
My original Air Asia flight from Kochi to Bangkok (which never got used because I had changed things around due to the demonetisation issues) had been going to land at Don Muang Airport, the budget airport rather than the usual one. My new flight was with SpiceJet - Delhi to Bangkok via Calcutta - and I thought this was also going to Don Muang so I was a bit confused when it didn't. I was wandering around looking for the A1 bus into the city for a while before realising I was at a different airport and had to take a train instead.
Bangkok's roads seemed so quiet and half-empty after the chaos that is India. I had gotten used to it and Thailand felt like "where is everyone?" And it is so clean! There are no piles of rubbish lining the roads, no cows or pigs roaming between the vehicles, nobody using the street as a toilet every twenty metres. I like Thailand very much.
I stayed in Bangkok just for one night, purely to go to the zoo that day - see
Dusit Zoo - Species list, 5 February 2017 and also here
Which Thai Zoos are Worth Visiting? for some additional comments on wild animals in the zoo grounds.
In the morning I headed off to Kaeng Krachan National Park which is on the border with southern Burma and is the largest national park in Thailand. I had been here only once before, in April 2014 (see
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part 3: 2013-2014 ). On previous visits to Thailand I had been put off by the frequently-repeated assertion that it is impossible to do this park without your own transport, something which I found is utterly untrue.
My start-point in Bangkok was to be the Southern Bus Terminal (aka Sai Mai Tai) from which buses and mini-vans ran to Petchaburi two hours away, and then from there I would get another mini-van to the village of Ban Kaeng Krachan which is a few kilometres from the park HQ. Being miserly I wanted to take a local city bus from my guesthouse to the bus terminal. This should have been easy and would cost only 12 Baht. Unfortunately the conductor never bothered to tell me when we reached the terminal. It wasn't until quite some time late that a lady asked me where I was going. Not impressed. I was going to take a bus back the other way but I was standing by the road for quite a while with no buses in sight so eventually broke and took a taxi for 70 Baht. Still cheaper than a taxi would have cost from my guesthouse, but a bit annoying nevertheless. I got a mini-van to Petchaburi for 100 Baht (a normal bus has more leg-room and would have cost the same, but there were none leaving for a couple of hours) and at the Petchaburi van-stop got one for 120 Baht which went all the way to the park HQ and took an hour. When I got there I found out that there are now mini-vans direct from Victory Monument in Bangkok to Kaeng Krachan for 200 Baht. Sigh.
There is no public transport beyond the HQ except the trucks at about 5am in the morning which take people up to see the morning fog, so to get from the HQ into the park without your own car you need to hitch. This is pretty easy in general. The first 20km stretch to the checkpoint is the trickiest because the road goes off to various other places along the way. Also, for me, today was a Monday and it was mid-afternoon - not the best time to be trying to get into the park! Fortunately after only about ten minutes a couple of UK birders drove past and picked me up. Any white person standing by the road here is going to the park and will almost certainly be a birder, although they probably still must have taken a punt on me not being a psychopath. They weren't going into the park itself because they were staying at the Ban Maka Bird Camp, however they took me all the way up to the checkpoint anyway which was right nice of them. Once at the checkpoint there is only one road, going 15km to the lower campsite and then another 15km to the upper campsite, so you just sit down and wait for a car.
I had one main reason for coming back to Kaeng Krachan, and that was to try and see a Fea's muntjac. There are quite a few species of these small deer around Asia. The common muntjac, as its name suggests, is found pretty much everywhere from India to Indonesia. The Fea's muntjac has a much more restricted range, probably being found only in southern Burma and the adjacent parts of Thailand. I think Kaeng Krachan is probably the only place where one can go and reasonably expect to see one, but they seem to be only found in the higher parts of the park (and there are also common muntjac in the park, so you need to get a good look to ensure you have identified it properly if you see one!). My plan was to spend all my nights at the upper campsite until I saw one. However there are specific times for going up and down the road between the two campsites, and so for the first night I just stayed at the lower one.
This was no great hardship of course. There was a large troop of dusky langurs in the trees around the campsite, a black giant squirrel in another tree, and in a big fruiting fig tree there were loads of grey-bellied squirrels, Oriental pied hornbills and thick-billed green pigeons. In the evening Malayan crested porcupines came out behind the restaurant to feed on scraps put out for them. Last time I was here there were brush-tailed porcupines living under one of the toilet blocks, but they were not to be found there now. I went spotlighting for a little while around the campsite too, finding a common palm civet and a pair of lesser mouse deer. You can't do a whole lot of night-wandering at Kaeng Krachan because at night the elephants use the roads and the ones here are particularly ornery - several people have been killed here by elephants.
I hitched to the upper campsite at 6am the next morning, on one of the fog trucks. The trucks go to a viewpoint 6km past the upper campsite from which one can marvel at the great spectacle of fog. It is actually pretty cool, despite how boring it sounds. The altitude is not that high - less than 1000 metres - but in the morning all you can see are the forest-covered hilltops showing like islands in a sea of fog. The only time I went to the viewpoint I got there in the middle of the day (by walking) and the fog was long gone, but you can see the fog-sea from the upper campsite as well if you stand in the right place.
A few things were very different on this visit from my 2014 visit. Firstly it was bone-dry in the park. Everything along the roadsides was grey, and it wasn't much fun birding along the road when a convoy of cars roared past in clouds of dust. Perhaps connected to this, there didn't seem to be a lot of birds around. Some bird guides I talked to (leading small tours) said it was really quiet, so it wasn't just my imagination. Also possibly connected, there were no bees! Last time I was here there were giant forest bees everywhere, especially at the upper camp there were great swarms of them. Now I only saw one small hive, saw no giant bees in flight at all, and even the little sweat bees were almost non-existent. On the plus side, there were almost no bird-photographers and that was a blessed relief!
By the upper campsite I spotted a banded leaf monkey, strangely enough all by himself amongst a troop of dusky langurs. There has been a lot of confusion over the banded leaf monkeys at Kaeng Krachan. They are the
robinsoni subspecies - greyish on the belly, with pink lips and eye-rings, and otherwise jet-black - but a number of reports claim them as being Tenasserim langurs which is a little-known southern Burmese species which may or may not occur at Kaeng Krachan. I haven't seen any photos of Tenasserim langurs from Kaeng Krachan, but I have seen several photos of
robinsoni banded leaf monkeys labelled as Tenasserim langurs. My personal viewpoint on it is that a particular mammal-watcher misidentified the langurs as Tenasserim langurs in a trip report and then other mammal-watchers and birders simply followed on from that report without questioning it.
Last time I was here I only managed to see the banded leaf monkeys once - but on this visit I found them easy to find and saw them every day on which I was in the upper levels of the park, usually in large troops. Still didn't manage to get any good photos though!
There wasn't much in the way of birds on the first day at the upper campsite. I walked part of the way to the viewpoint and only saw about fifteen species. Most of the way along the road the forest just drops away off the side. You can hear things moving in the dry leaves but you can't see a thing because the drop is too steep, or there is too much undergrowth between the road and the edge, or you just make too much noise on the dead leaves as you try to creep to the edge. Best animal of the day was a Berdmore's ground squirrel (the first one I'd ever seen) which scampered onto the road and then just stood there allowing me to take his photo. He obviously didn't realise that the freezing trick doesn't hide you when you're not on the leaf litter. I don't think there's many species of squirrels left for me to see in southeast Asia any more.
The second day I tried the Orchid Nature Trail in the early morning and found nothing. In 2014 I had a really good bird-wave (a mixed feeding-flock) here which included the ratchet-tailed treepie, but this visit I never found anything except hair-crested drongos (which, incidentally, I kept seeing in large flocks of twenty or thirty birds, which for drongos was really weird). After breakfast I walked to the viewpoint. This walk was considerably better than yesterday's, with a fairly good bird-wave which included cartoon-like silver-breasted broadbills, yellow-bellied warblers, white-browed scimitar-babblers, black-naped monarchs, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, striped tit-babblers, and a fantastic little white-browed piculet which is a woodpecker the size of a sparrow.
As yesterday, though, the best animal of the day was a mammal. And it was, surprisingly, the very mammal which I had come to the park to find - the Fea's muntjac. As I came round a bend about 10.30 in the morning, there was one just standing at the side of the road. He stayed in place for about a minute while I checked him out through the binoculars. When I tried to move out further to try for a proper photo he turned and left pretty quickly. I did get a couple of photos but they were silhouetted and don't show much other than a muntjac shape. I was pretty pleased to have seen him though. I had been expecting it to take much longer, if I even saw one at all. It was a twelve kilometre walk, but if someone had said to me that I would definitely see a Fea's muntjac but I'd have to walk twelve kilometres to do it, I'd have said "let's go". Actually there are a lot of animals I'd walk twelve kilometres for even a small chance at. I think the longest I've walked in one stretch for a specific animal is twenty kilometres for ibisbill in China - and I didn't see any!
Thankyou for such a great blog again
- I look forward to the photos you can put in the gallery in time. And even among all the excellent wildlife watching experiences you have shared with us, I think the best bit for me is still the saga of the Moon Lanka Yala hotel in Sri Lanka!
