Thailand - Khao Yai National Park

Welcome back and thanks for joining me for another adventure in Thailand. Thailand has 147 national parks, each one having its own unique character and natural wonder. In this video, I'm going to take you to Thailand's very first national park and the third largest in the kingdom. I'm also going to take you to some very famous waterfalls. I'm going to tell you why, so stick around and find out. But first, back to the launch pad to adventure, we're going to Bangkok. Well, hello there. Look at me, I'm sitting in a hostel, downtown Bangkok. I haven't been in a hostel for years. But hey, I'm only here for a few hours because I've got a 6am pickup at Sabarnaboon airport in Bangkok tomorrow morning. A good buddy from Canada is coming in and we're going to go on a little adventure. I'm not sure exactly where yet. That's the catch. I'm going to propose a few ideas to him in the morning, and we're going to let him decide where we're going to go. So stick around, see what happens. Downtown Bangkok. Good morning. I'm at Sabarnaboon airport. It's bright and early. Normally when I'm at the airport, I'm either flying somewhere or I've just landed. But today, I got a buddy's just landed. So we're going to go greet him. He should be coming through immigration any moment and you're going to meet him. All right, let's go. All right, well, the adventure is just about to begin. My buddy Kyron has arrived. The gentle giant is right there. Hey, Kyron. Welcome to Thailand. How are you? Good. Good Awesome. Well, after a 16 hour flight, Kyron was well rested and ready for adventure. I gave him the option of going south to the islands, staying in Bangkok, heading to the beaches of Pattaya, or heading north to a national park. And Kyron, being the adventurer he is, he chose the latter. And with only a few hours after landing, we were on a three hour train ride to northern Thailand to visit one of Thailand's most famous national parks. Just last week, I was on the train heading north from Bangkok to Korat. Now, one week later, I'm back on the train again with my buddy Kyron. We're going to go explore Khao Yai National Park. The three hour train journey from Bangkok took us to a small village called Pak Chong. There, we caught another van. It took us 30 minutes to get to the gateway to the national park to another small village where we decided to get a hotel room for the night. On Google Maps, we found a nice hotel only a couple of kilometers from where the bus dropped us off. Unfortunately, it was then we found out that there were absolutely zero taxis in this little village and our only option to get there was to walk. After another 45 minute walk in the 35 degree temperature, we finally arrived at a resort, the Jungle House Resort, a beautiful resort alongside the highway. We ended up getting a room with two beds, air conditioning for 1,300 Thai Baht, which included breakfast in the morning. Let's go behind door number two. After we got settled in and had a shower, we ventured down to a local restaurant nearby and had some dinner. After that, we returned to the resort and retired early because it had been a long day for both of us. And we also planned to get an early start exploring the park in the morning. Due to the fact we were the only people at the resort, they didn't have a cook and had to bring one in special just to cook us our bacon and eggs. Thai Dao and sausage. Well, good morning. So my buddy Kyron and I last night, we made it all the way to the gate of Khao Yai National Park. It was quite a journey. We ended up taking a train all the way up to Pak Chong. We walked around Pak Chong for probably about a half hour trying to find where we kept the bus to the gateway here to Khao Yai. Finally found that we got on a half hour bus ride up here to the gateway of the park. We got out and we walked around for probably about an hour, another couple kilometers of hiking around. So we found this beautiful place, the Jungle House here at the gateway where we spent the night, had a nice dinner and got to bed early because today we got a big adventure. We're heading into Khao Yai National Park. But first, we're going to have some breakfast. Well, our first stop in Khao Yai Park is Feen Little Elephant right here at Jungle House Resort. How nice. All right, so now we are on our way to into Khao Yai National Park. We're getting a ride from our hosts here at the Jungle Lodge. There's not a lot of transportation out here in the jungle. We're fortunate enough to get a ride from the owner of the resort. So we're heading to the park gate and apparently you can get a guide there. We're not too sure what to expect, but we're gonna see what happens. Well, here we are at the gate, Khao Yai National Park. We're just about to enter. Let the adventure begin. Of course, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a couple selfies at the entry gate prior to entering the park before paying our entry fee. Well, we've made it inside the park now. We've paid our 400 baht entry fee and apparently now we've got to get to the center of the park, which is 14 kilometers away. I'm not really sure if we have to take a taxi or how that's going to work, but I hope we're going to find out here in just a As I mentioned earlier, there were no taxis in the park and our only option was to hitch a ride the old-fashioned way. And just like that, we've got ourselves a ride to the center of the National Park. They did have motorbikes for rent at the gate, but unfortunately they were not for foreigners. We were told that foreigners have to rent a bike in Pak Chong, so there you have it. You need your own transportation to enjoy this park fully. There were some guided tours once we got to the visitor center inside the park, but getting in or out of the park, you're on your own. All right, we've made it to the visitor center here now in the center of Khao Yai National Park. This is where we're going to make our plan and figure out how we're going to explore this beautiful park. We just got a beautiful ride in the back of a pickup truck, 14 kilometers. Absolutely amazing, beautiful scenery. We've got a few clips here. Anyways, hopefully we're going to see a bunch of more amazing stuff. We've already seen some monkeys just up the road, so maybe get some videos of that too. Stick around. Khao Yai National Park was established in 1962 and covers an area of over 2,168 square kilometers. It is known as one of the best parks to view wild elephants in the country, and it is also home to a variety of other animal species, including the barking deer, jackals, lizards, great hornbills, snakes, Asian black bears, and of course the ever curious, thieving, long-tail macaque. What are you doing? It looks like somebody wasn't very happy about a macaque eating his lunch. Next up, Kyron and I decided to do a little exploring. Many of the hiking trails in the park require a guide. However, there was one right behind the visitor center, about 1.2 kilometers, that you could hike on your own. So, we thought it'd be rude if we didn't go have a look. Well, one of the main attractions here in Khao Yai National Park is the Khao Suat Waterfalls. You can see them behind me. What a beautiful spot here in the middle of the park. These are the famous waterfalls I was referring to earlier in the video. You may be familiar with Maya Bay, the location where they filmed the movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, these are the waterfalls they had to jump off to get to the secret beach. Spoiler alert, the waterfalls are a thousand kilometers away from Maya Bay. To get to these waterfalls, we had to pay a tour guide, 500 Thai Baht, for a return trip to and from the visitor center. We'd actually planned to spend a couple days exploring the park, but not having a vehicle proved to be quite difficult getting around inside the park. So, as the day was closing in on us, we had to make a plan. So, we decided to head back to Pak Chong to see if we could catch a train south of civilization. Well, we're coming to the end of a great day here in northern Thailand. We had a great day in Khao Yai National Park and we worked our way all the way back to Pak Chong, where we're now about to get on a train and head back to Bangkok, all aboard. Well, that's it for this video folks. 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