Thursday, February 16, 2006

Chom Phon Caves


The cars as given us a great amount of freedom, Last weekend we went to Chom Phon Caves. These are 180km west of Bangkok and only 50km from the Burmese border. Unlike Cambodia, Thailand as a fairly good road system. Some of the signs are not in english which isn't nice, but all in all very good roads.

We found the caves easy enough with the help Nuch's superb map reading skills. Once in the car park we were greeted by a woman putting a stuffed fluffy crocodile on the roof of the car??? We looked at her, then she pointed to a 100 strong troop of monkies moping about the place. The Stuffed crocs stop them from demolitioning your car through fear.

The cave was fantastic, a short walk down some steps to a huge cavern with a 500m walk into the mountain side. There were bats everywhere and at the bottom of the cave was a Buddist Shrine, the roof had a gap and gave a superb photo opportunity with the sunbeams. There was a large reclining buddha and a monk on hand to take prayers. A really cool place.


Outside it was time to run the guantlet of hungry monkies, they were spaniel size things with huge teeth. In return for the monkey scarecrow on the car, the locals liked you to buy some food for the monkies. Christ! it was a feeding frenzy, they were in your pockets, pulling hairs on your legs. If you didn't give the boss food first there was hell to pay for the poor lower monkey who took the food. It was great.

The price of admission was the 20 baht for candles and insense in the shrine and 20 baht for monkey food.

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