In The Jungle

Racing along in the back of the jeep so fast that one of the girls is feeling very sick, we're all wondering how on earth we're going to see any animals going at this speed...

It's been a really successful day so far. Within minutes of stopping to have a mini briefing, our guide jumped up "come, come" - from 100yards away he spotted a thin snake hiding in a tree, one of those 'it's obvious once you've seen it' situations. He continued to amaze us throughout the day with his ability to find animals, insects, reptiles that were seemingly impossible to spot (we even wondered at times whether he'd been secretly carrying them around all day and just planted them without us seeing!). Thoughout the day we saw three more snakes (1 whip snake, and 3 pit vipers), three gibbons, three monkey families (adding up to a lot of monkeys!), two water monitors, two water dragons (endangered!), a lot of spiders, a hornbill, a kingfisher, a egret (white), a couple of deer, a scorpion (that he brought into the back of the jeep with us - too close for comfort!!), a few geckos and even an extremely rare endangered crocodile (as in there are only two that live in the entire river we were walking down). Our guide also found a porcupine quill, which basically counts as seeing a porcupine, right?!

We'd stopped in a few locations before spending the afternoon trekking between two waterfalls - one of which is apparently famous from a Leonardo Di Caprio film that I haven't seen - and we were now on the last bit of the day - a drive around to "see if we can see some animals".

As I said, we were dubious about seeing more animals, given the way they were driving, until suddenly we slowed down next to another tour jeep. Some excited Thai conversation and a few hand gestures later, and we quickly realised the reason we had been driving so fast - we had a very real possibility of seeing a wild elephant. Our guide had been called by his friend, and sure enough, if we listened hard enough, we could hear the branches cracking under the feet of a large animal. As we watched with baited breath, the leaves began to rustle, and our guide waved to the elephant "come this way, come this way". Unfortunately, whether it's that he didn't understand or just simply didn't care, the elephant didn't quite make it out into the clear, but our driver drove us a little closer and through the branches we could see our elephant. He very kindly turned around a couple of times, so we could see his head and his tail. He didn't come close enough for us to get good photos (sorry mum!), but it's the memories that count ultimately.

I saw a wild elephant in the jungle.