The wooden plank that served as my seat shivered in time with the longboat’s naked motor as we shot across Cheow Larn Lake. Sheer limestone cliffs stabbed upwards from the jade water all around us. Every one of the hundred islands was shrouded in jungle trees that were shriveling their way through the dry season. Black shadows were thrown down the white cliff faces by the high-noon sun, which made the entire world blaze with unforgiving light. I pressed my sunglasses closer against my face, trying to block out its rays, but the ubiquitous mixture of sweat and sunscreen had turned the slope of my nose into a ski piste that my RayBans were hell-bent on sliding down. Our captain wove through a network of impossible islands, often three times taller than they were wide, like natural skyscrapers that had been shaped by the sheer forces of Earth. The boat ride’s final destination was no less surreal than the hour-long journey itself. Our bow was pointed towards a free-floating, all-inclusive, jungle-hut complex where travelers can sleep overnight. Cheow Larn Lake (also anglicised as Cheow Lan or Chiewlarn) has a few of these complexes scattered around, but the huge reservoir was only constructed in the 80s and is still finding its way onto the tourist map, so each complex gets to inhabit its own private appendix-like bay of the reservoir.
Our boat skirted one final spit of land and our little island of civilization appeared: a haphazard collection of huts in 4 different styles that floated motionless in a sheltered half-moon bay. Once the motor cut, silence and sticky air settled around my head and body like a blanket. We spilled off the boat directly onto an enormous floating open-air common room/kitchen complex. It reminded me of a bird’s body, while the two wings made of conjoined huts spread outwards towards the East and West. I’m the target audience for spending a quiet night floating in the Thai jungle, and this overnight trip was actually the first thing I booked while planning my Thai-tinerary. The part I had willfully ignored, right up until I set foot on this complex, was that I had chosen an affordable floating all-inclusive hostel, where the meals are a communal buffet-style and the excursions would be shared with a hundred other travelers who were mostly younger than me. I mention this because I’m a quiet person by nature. In my younger decades I had tried to wear a more gregarious and extroverted mask, but the deeper I’ve slid deeper into my 30s, the closer I’ve stuck to my introverted truth. As we moved through the hammock-and-picnic-table common room, heaped with people who had arrived the day before and were already eating lunch, everyone began the familiar ritual of trying to befriend each other. I quickly realized two things: one, it would be easier to enjoy the next 24 hours if I found at least one person to latch onto, and two, the couple who had sat on the boat bench behind me seemed interesting, especially since they were the only locals present besides the staff.
First order of business, though, was to check into my hut and get into the water as soon as possible. I carefully schlepped my pack along the shaky floating walkway, extremely aware of how top-heavy I was. I eyed the rusting knee-high railing and knew it could do absolutely nothing to keep me out of the drink, if push came to shove. The entire front of my cabin was a floor-to-ceiling window, and a peek inside revealed a basic bed, an Asia-style wet bathroom with running (if jungle-temperature) water, and even a few power outlets. Strips of sunlit jade water sparkled up at me from between the wooden planks of my floor. I nervously placed my phone at the center of the bed, eyeballing its narrowest dimension in relation to the size of the floor’s cracks. We’d been warned that our huts hovered about 30 feet above the lake floor, which was already a phone graveyard. I noticed at least six of my hut’s back window panes were presumably on the bottom of the lake, too, so I opened the remaining windows to coax in the limp afternoon breeze.
Within minutes of colonizing my hut, I had slithered out of my perpetually damp clothing and thrown myself off my front porch into the tropical fresh water, which – as one rocket scientist noticed from a few doors down – was “so warm! I thought it would be colder.” I languished on a floating mat in my “front lawn” for a few minutes before I grew weary of my loud compatriots, then swam back to my hut and freed the kayak that was tied to my front porch. And then I was gone, powering away from the noisy island of civilization, dodging the still-standing bleached skeletons of long-drowned trees on my way to the opposite shore, where the wild jungle beckoned. Crashing noises came from bamboo stands above my head, presumably made by hidden troops of monkeys. A shrill whine reminiscent of a fire alarm began, probably an insect whose voice was hilariously larger than its body. I paddled into the long shadow cast by a supercanopy tree and flung myself across the kayak’s hot red plastic like a starfish, lying on my back with my hands and feet in the water and staring up at the unfamiliar birds that soared through the white-blue sky. Eventually I closed my sunglassed eyes against the pupil-shattering light, and just allowed myself to drift through a foreign soundscape.
I coasted back to my cabin to find that the interesting local couple was living in the cabin next to mine, and we all took this as a sign that we would be each other’s Hostel People for the next 24 hours. Before I’d even finished tying up my kayak, they’d invited me next door. I didn’t even bother putting on pants before I went to introduce myself to the English immigrant and their Thai fiance, who had driven up from their hometown of Phuket to celebrate their fourth anniversary. Our hostel had a cute no-outside-alcohol rule, which everyone had predictably ignored. I settled onto a low-slung hammock chair that decorated their porch and was handed a cocktail made from an unknown Thai liquor, complete with ice cubes pilfered from the kitchen’s gigantic coolers. We began the age-old tradition of befriending complete strangers, trading life stories and intercultural jokes. I learned that the local woman was ethnically Thai but had grown up “stateless” in a jungle village that was technically located in the neighboring country of Burma. Her perpetually-melting English fiance had arrived shortly before the pandemic, gotten stuck on their way to Australia, and just decided to stay and teach English. The heat and my constant dehydration meant I got tipsy easier than expected, and when I stood up an hour later to walk to dinner, the floating walkway swayed alarmingly under my feet.
I heaped my plate with hot food and watched with amusement as my new Thai friend pulled a huge jar of home-cooked chilies from her bag and doused her food with them. She had clearly foreseen the tourist-friendly food being bland by her standards. I made a forgettable joke about it and she just pointed the jar’s open mouth at me in response. Heeding the Brit’s warning about the spicyness, I plucked out a single flake the size of gold dust and stuck it to my tongue, then spent the next five minutes trying not to cry.
An hour before sunset, we gathered for an evening boat safari. A gaggle of already-drunk 30-somethings poured onto a pair of longboats, slightly smaller than the one we’d come in on. Our guide and pilot introduced himself as “KitKat, yes, like the candy” (many Thai have “official” nicknames they use in lieu of real names), and we were off. In a protected jungle habitat known to contain tigers, cloud leopards, elephants, and Malayan sun bears, you never know what you’re going to see, although the answer probably includes monkeys. The first critters we stumbled upon were a pair of enormous wild cattle called “gaur” drinking from the lake, which was somewhat humdrum for the dairy-cow-inured foreigners but absolutely fascinating to my local Thai friend, who kept repeating how rare it is for locals to see these vulnerable creatures in the wild. Next came a swimming monitor lizard, whose body seemed to just keep growing as it hauled itself foot by foot onto land, until its entire 6-foot body lay dripping on the shore. We sailed in and out of blind bays – old mountain valleys now filled with water – and my brain tried to wrap itself around all the tropical tree species I’d never seen before. Finally KitKat killed the engine, hollered, and pointed at a troop of long-tailed macaques leaping through the swaying bamboo just above our heads. The monkeys promptly put on a show for us, displaying the four f’s of evolution: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and…mating. Our boatload predictably burst into laughter, catcalling up at the monkeys. Maybe we are not so evolutionarily diverged from them after all. Finally the golden light began to wane and we motored out to open water to watch the orange eye of the sun sink below the jagged limestone rim of the sky. Dark falls quickly in the tropics, where the sun dives perpendicular past the horizon. That night, the space of only a few minutes separated my waking hours from sleeping hours, overstimulated from the day’s travel and socializing and all the new things I’d seen, but it was enough time to register the most complete calm and near-silence I have experienced in a long while. The only things I could hear were the gentle swish of fresh water just beneath my head, a few stray night jungle sounds amplifying across the still water, and a few errant human voices from nearby cabins, but there was none of the persistent sound of human civilization that pervades every other airspace I’d slept in for most of my life. Thus becalmed, I slipped into a dreamless sleep.
As it always does, 6 a.m. arrived too early, but I wasn’t about to miss out on the sunrise boat safari just because I’m a Morgenmuffel who’d drunk a bit too much the night before. So few of us were awake that I was able to snag a coveted breakfast seat on the dock, facing out over the water. I choked down my powdered coffee and swung my bare feet lazily through the motionless humid air. Below me swirled a school of enormous fish hoping for crumbs. Before me spread a mirrored world of copper and lavender, the sun awake but still hidden behind dark clouds and limestone cliffs to the East. She still had not yet appeared by the time a handful of us boarded the longboats. Again I snagged a front-row seat and sat alone at the bow, happy for the silence. We slid into the mirrored pastel world and I was awash in gratitude, which I had started letting into myself while visiting Japan’s temples and shrines a few weeks before. I breathed deep the fresh jungle air, trying to store some of it in the pockets of my lungs for later.
My face pointed hungrily towards the jungle. We motored slower than we had the night before; perhaps KitKat was still half-asleep, or loath to disturb the calm of the morning. I fastened my eyes on each clump of bamboo, watching for the telltale shiver that signaled a monkey’s presence. All was still; perhaps the monkeys were half-asleep too. I eventually noticed that most of my human compatriots were ignoring the jungle, instead listening in rapt attention as one of them discussed where she was traveling to the next day. Why anyone would bother to travel all the way to this fantastic jungle reservoir in Thailand, wake up at sunrise for a longboat safari, and then spend their time listening to a stranger’s plans for tomorrow rather than looking at the glorious jungle they were currently in and had come all that way to see…was beyond me. At least my version of seeking validation from strangers requires me to watch the jungle, I thought from atop my high horse, as I raised my camera to take a bunch of pictures for all 4 of my Instagram fans (thanks guys). Despite my vigilance the wildlife laid low all morning, although another group caught a glimpse of gibbons that were gone by the time we arrived. Any disappointment I felt over the safari-less safari was drowned out by the sheer gloriousness of the morning, as well as the slew of strange animals I saw up close and personal during our next and final excursion.
Nam Ta Lu cave is a nearly one-kilometer hike through a pitch-black limestone hole in the ground that’s infested with tarantulas, crickets, and whip spiders (a la the Unforgivable Curses scene in Harry Potter 4). It’s also full of bats, but since they’re my favorite animal, “infested” is the wrong word. The cave was carved by a cool river that still runs through its gullet, and in monsoon season, the cave completely floods and is impenetrable to visitors. Even in March, which is the dead of dry season, the river runs free. In most places its caverns are big enough to hold a suburban house, and the river is little more than a creek, but in the deeper places, there were shoulder-thin passages through which we and the river both needed to pass. Our only option, half a mile deep into the Earth, was to jump into cold black river water, so deep you can’t touch the bottom. I was spelunking and swimming through this hot nightmare hole half-naked, wearing nothing besides a swimsuit, sandals, and headlamp. This was extra fun because the guides’ most favorite hobby was finding tarantulas and then convincing them to sprint towards us. The guides’ second most favorite hobby was silently coming up behind you while you were warily watching a tarantula and tapping you lightly on the ankle with a hiking stick. I suppose I also forgot to mention that getting to the mouth of this cave requires a two-kilometer hike through the sweltering jungle where tigers and elephants roam. In case you can’t tell, I was equal parts delighted and horrified by this experience. Nature – yay! Spiders – augh! Sparkly cave formations – yay! Wet black holes where I could drown – boo! On the unequivocal upside, I found a really pretty indigo feather on the ground during the hike, and briefly talked with a few nice people, and thanks to the nature of hiking, I was able to exit the conversation whenever I felt like it by dropping back to take some photographs.
Too soon, it was time to board the big longboat back to the real world. Technically you can stay at the huts for multiple days, but my Thai days were numbered and that night I would have to board a night train from Surat Thani to Bangkok on my way to Cambodia. Our longboat wove back out through impossible karst skyscrapers, and I slipped into my final jungle trance, thinking about nothing, and feeling only awe.
Window Seat Odyssey 
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