Picked up at 7.30 am, fortified by stir fried noodles, by a driver who thinks they drive on the right here especially around steep bends and a guide fluent in German with a little Thai/German accented English who passes some of the 2hr drive showing us pictures of his 60 chickens and cockerels, bred for decorative plumage, which sell to rich Thais for £40 - £3000 as live ornaments. He insists the neon pink eggs and chickens are real and not, as we cynics suspect, photoshopped.

The park is an area of limestone crags and peaks, wavy stripes of white, pink and black rock covered in areas by dense bamboo and pine jungle, like the Lost World swathed in early morning mist. We aim for the large central lake produced by a dam, and take a longtail boat across clear deep turquoise water surrounded by cliffs and studded with islands, like a Chinese painting.

We explore a large limestone cave and walk in the jungle finding many tarantulas in their dens and other spider nests camouflaged by woven mossy circular flaps ingeniously pegged down by thin guy ropes which alert the spider when twanged by a passing meal.

For us another Thai banquet on a floating thatched restaurant at the waters edge. On the next table some young Thais play cards. Gambling is illegal in Thailand but goes on behind closed doors and here in remote areas out in the open . The guide gives us a taste of their curry, popular with locals but never on tourist menus as it smells and tastes like a farmyard, pungent cowhide, sweaty horse and stale manure. I'll try anything once, some things like this once only. Too heavy to swim we sit on the verandah watching black and white-faced gibbons and pale brown long tailed macaque monkeys in the trees and on the shore opposite. Too soon we have to leave as the guide wants to get back before it rains, but we soon see a thick misty curtain hung between the cliff and islands ahead, still beautiful but now a hazy woodcut in shades of grey, the guide glumly hands out large waterproof macs and we put our bags on our knees, don the macs, tie the hoods and sit huddled like heavily pregnant black and blue plastic gnomes our backs to the sheets of water for half an hour. Before long I feel water running down my back and stretching out my arm a jet of water shoots out of the sleeve. I have sprung a leak. At least it is warm and I am laughing and grinning like an idiot, the rest look unhappy, but Martin smiles at me with the often repeated refrain, 'another fine mess you've got me into'. So much more fun this way.