We were woken up at 7 by a knock on the door. After a quick (cold) shower and breakfast we left our passports and backpacks with the guest house and left in a small mini-van. There were only four people on the tour, us 2 and 2 German girls, Marisa and Karen. Our guide Choke (he strangled himself trying to make us understand his name in English) spoke some English, but you had to pay attention and often had to ask him to repeat it. It took us an hour to arrive at the Erawan Waterfalls The Waterfalls are 2 series of small falls, stretching 2 kilometers in length and going up about 400 meters. We spend 5 hours here, walking all the way up and had a great time swimming in the ponds and sliding down the large rocks. The first pool we swam in had a group of monkeys on the other side, who took no notice of us and at one point even did a “quicky”… There were 7 levels all together and we swam in 4. The last part we walked up through the middle of the stream, great fun.

Have a look at the pictures and you’ll see what we mean.

Afterwards we had some lunch (fried rice with omelet) and went to ride the Elephants. All 4 of us were a bit reluctant and found it a bit to tourist, but luckily it only lasted about 30 minutes. As a special treat I was allowed to ride the last part up from in stead of on the normal bench. This was very uncomfortable and very high above the ground…. We did buy the elephants dome bananas which they enjoyed very much.

The rafting turned out to be anything but wild. Imagine a very broad river, moving about 5 km/hour. Then imagine a bamboo raft, 4x4 meters, us on small benches and a Thai guy who did the steering. It was relaxing though.

After this “wild” adventure we went to a huge lake where there were a number of boat houses, one of which was ours to sleep on. We had a nice dinner, (tofu soup, fried rice with fried fish, chicken with cashew nuts and fresh fruit for desert), some beers and talked with Choke and Marisa and Karen.