"In America, no bugs?"

Thailand is beautiful - the sea is clear blue, the sand is white, the palm trees are bright green and the air is fresh! However, if you look too closely at the beautiful nature in Thailand, all you will see are bugs. I hate bugs. I can handle a lot of things but I cannot handle bugs, especially big ones. And Thailand is full of big bugs. And I mean BIG bugs. And while mosquitoes, cockroaches and geckos (which are just bugs in reptile form) were everywhere we went, few places had quite the bug count that Chiang Mai and Khao Sok did, and it all started on the overnight train from Ayutthaya.

I love trains. So, I really love overnight trains. They are just like riding on a regular train but they were made for sleeping, so instead of spending the night sleeping in a seat, like you would on a plane or a bus, you get to sleep in a bed! In China, the beds aren't that great (it's no White Christmas, I'll tell ya that much) but they're efficent, relatively inexpensive and you go to sleep and when you wake up your at your destination, so they're pretty great! However, in Thailand, the trains are awesome, or at least I thought they were at first. The beds are way bigger than the China ones and the cars are much more White Christmassy than the ones in China. Also, they have air conditioning which was a welcome change from the day trains that we had taken in Thailand. Around 9, all the lights in the train turns off and everyone goes to sleep. However, I was so tired from all of the traveling that we had done the week before, that I fell asleep almost as soon as I laid down. I slept through the whole night and didn't wake up until they announced that we were twenty minutes from Chiang Mai. Just as I was opening my eyes and thinking to myself "thank you, Thailand, for having such great overnight trains" I spotted a GIANT cockroach (and I've seen some pretty big cockroaches so you know this one was huge). I'm pretty sure that's the fastest I've ever woken up. It wasn't even five minutes before I had woken up Carly and moved myself and all of my stuff into her bunk, leaving Mr. Cockroach my entire bunk to himself.

When we got to Chiang Mai, we spent a few days in the city before we moved down to Khao Sok National Park for a few days in the jungle. Now, I don't know if you know but, I'm not really a nature person. I appreciate trees and flowers. I appreciate a light hike through the woods. The National Park, however, was not exactly going for a walk and looking at pretty flowers. It was more like living in the middle of the jungle -because that's what it was (our shower used water that flowed fresh from the spring and down the bamboo shoot into our bathroom....it was freezing.). There were not only geckos in our shower (because there were geckos in all of the showers that we used in Thailand) but there were also milipedes and ants and spiders. Thankfully, I didn't realize the extent to which there were bugs everywhere until the middle of the night, otherwise, I might not have stayed as long as I did.

We were staying at a little bungalow just outside of the National Park and, from our hostel,we had access to a bunch of tours and activities inside the National Park with the a National Park guide. Our guide was named Ahm. One of the activities we could do was a night safari and since we didn't have much time to be in the National Park, we decided to do the night safari the night that we got there. At 9 o'clock at night, they gave us head lamps and we followed Ahm into the (very) dark jungle. A few minutes in and we had already seen 2 pit vipers and a little family of slow loris' (which were really cool). But then, we weren't really finding anything. And, we were so busy talking to Ahm that we weren't really doing much looking. But he was. He found everything and he did it by seeing the light glitter off of their eyes. And, once he showed us how to see the glittering (which was everywhere) we found a lot more things - that I actually really wish we hadn't. For example, the baby tarantula. A second example would be the not-so-baby tarantula. We also saw a GIANT beetle, like even bigger than the cockroach on the train had been. Even Ahm, who had been using a stick to show us its pinchers, panicked when it started getting a little too close. We also saw many, many other spiders. Ahm knew all of the names but I can't recall them right now. It kind of made me think about those whale watch tours and how they mostly see whales but sometimes they see things like seals and dolphins because this was kind of like that but with spiders. We saw lots of spiders and some other things but lots and lots of spiders. (That "looking for the glitter" trick really opened my eyes to just how many spiders there are everywhere, all the time...it also changed the way that I will look at glitter forever.) Then, we got off the big trail. As we were hopping over logs and branches and trying not to bump into these oddly spikey trees, Ahm would throw out helpful hints like "be careful of pythons" and "don't worry, the tigers are very shy but just try to be quiet" or "do not touch this tree, VERY big spider on it". It was on the tiny trails that we saw monekys, praying mantis, chameleons and more spiders.

The next day, we went on our trek through the jungle. Ahm took us on the same path that we had gone on the night before but it was a whole different ball game during the day, let me tell you. The walk is a thousand times more peaceful when you don't have to worry about seeing the reflection from you headlamp in the eyes of the thousands of bugs everywhere. However, it also meant that we could see the actual bugs, like not just their eyes, much more easily. So, when Ahm said "careful VERY big spider" I couldn't NOT see the VERY big spider. And he was always right. They were always huge. One of them was almost the size of my hand and he was just sitting in his web like he didn't have a single care in the world. Yuck. I will tell you, though, that being able to see where you're going does make trekking through the jungle approximately a thousand times easier - even if it means not being able to avoid the scary bugs.

Trekking through the jungle was very fun, even though there were so many bugs. And, at the end of our day long hike, we swam in a little waterfall and while we were swimming, a family of monkeys came and played in the trees over the water. It was very cool - but I never need to see most of those bugs ever again. (Although, I do wish I could remember the names of them but such is life I suppose.) And, in the moments when I'm here and wishing I was still trekking through the jungle or lying on the beach, I think about the bugs (mainly the spiders) and it helps me to find contentment in where I am again.

*The title of this post came from a conversation that we had with a woman who worked at our hostel in Koh Lanta when there was a giant spider that had made its home across our entire bathroom and then had put himself right in the middle of the web/bathroom. Apparently, not that many guests ask her to kill the spiders in their rooms....*