During breakfast, I have to rush back to the room to get the camera, for the real feast is happening at the bird feeders next to our breakfast table, with beautiful flowerpeckers coming to feed off the bananas on offer. The owner, seeing our interest, shows us an active nest of a tailorbird in the flowerbed. It’s the ultimate display of craftsmanship – a broad leaf carefully folded upon itself and sewn with thin twigs to form a pocket in which the nest is built. We watched as the parents came in turns to feed the chick with insects, and also saw a spiderhunter foraging on the nearby plants.
The owner of the resort organized a boat trip for us, and we went to meet the boatman in the pier. After paying the entrance fee to the National Park, we went on our way. The Ratchaprapha Reservoir was artificially created to establish a hydroelectric power plant, and in certain areas near the shore dead tree trunks could be seen sticking out of the water – memorial for the forest formerly covering the valley.
The landscape of the reservoir was beautiful, and we kept marveling at the ever-changing shoreline with its high cliffs and little islets, on the background of dramatic cloud formations. We had lunch at a floating ranger station, where the kids enjoyed examining the various fish species in the water and we enjoyed eating a couple – excellent Laarb Pla and good fried fish. When we left, a soaring Brahamini kite escorted us out of the bay.
At another little bay we anchored on the sandy shore and went on a jungle hik. Except for a fleeting view of a maroon woodpecker, the hike was animal-free, but it was very muddy, providing some excitement and comic relief when we tried, with limited success, to avoid slipping into the mud. The rain chased us back to the boat, and we made our way back to the pier, stopping in the middle of the lake for Daniel and me to take a short swim.
At night, we decided to buy some groceries, and get dinner at one of the roadside food stalls. There seemed to be many grocery stores nearby, but when we got to the nearest one we found, as usual, lots of cleaning supplies and dry goods, but very little in the way of food we wanted to buy. There were, for example, several different brands of mackerel in tomato sauce, but no tuna. Likewise, we didn’t find canned beans, peas or corn. We ended up buying some beer, a tiny bag of potato chips, and some puffed wheat which turned out to taste so awful even the kids left it untouched. On our way to the car it started raining so heavily that even the less than meter between the end of the tin roof and the car door was enough to get us rather wet. Our take-away dinner of noodle soup for everyone and chicken hotdogs for Daniel, bought at two nearby rainy stalls, was happily consumed with cold beer once we got back to the room and the rain subsided.
Family Trips 