1 May

We wake up early to make the 10h00 bus, bags packed we headed out for breakfast having found a nice little restaurant offering a full English breakfast for only 50 Baht. After the breakfast we head home but stop short at a book store where we try to buy two books and exchange one of Leanne's. The lady doesn't want to reduce the price nor does she want to exchange the other book, which to be honest had seen better days. We wait for 10 minutes for the owner to arrive and reduce the price a little but enough for us to feel comfortable and purchase the books. Leanne heads back to ensure everything is packed and ready while I return the motorcycle and draw some cash taking into account there are no banks in Kao Sok National Park.

Back at the hotel we meet Ferdi who wants me to bring my laptop seeing as he has a DVD he would like to share with me. Knowing it is a Biblical recording, I am very appreciative as unfortunately we had not brought anything with us on flash disk and due to space constraints had only taken a small Bible.

We collected our things and headed down where me met them and made the exchange. We spent some more time chatting with them before checking our watches and finding we only had 10 minutes to make the bus before it left. We greeted and headed for it at a steady pace. We had hardly arrived before the rains started falling, lucky for us there was no rain yesterday when we rented the motorcycle. The bus ride was long, from 11h00 till 16h00!

When we arrived we were stormed by 3 agents all intent on selling their accommodation to us in order to afford them some commission for the clients they provided. Leanne was busy with two of them while I chatted with another woman. If there were two words consistently uttered they were. "clean" and "cheap". We ended up going with the woman to her aunt and uncles place. About 6 bungalows standing in the middle of a palm tree plantation. We got a room for 250 Baht per night, it was clean and we were the only guests.

We went for a stroll through the town, which in fact didn't take long. Trying to find out from the parks board how much a guided trek cost and whether we could do it on our own. We ended up deciding to make the trek on our own.

We headed for one of the two only shops in the town, then to the other to compare prices. The first had been the cheapest so we returned to make the purchases of the supplements for the next days trek. On the way back we stopped to share a dinner at one restaurant before taking the long way home and I mean a real detour!

The lady was evidently worried that we had returned so late (it was already dark) but was glad to see us back. We chatted with her while waiting for our dinner before retiring for an early evening.