A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Tham Lot, Thailand

I will never be a birdwatcher.

Let me be clear that this implies no criticism of birdwatchers. I admire their zeal, patience and general eccentricity, character traits I admire no matter what the obsession. In my case, although I posess zeal and eccentricity in some abundance, it's patience that I utterly lack. This was made glaringly clear as I visited Tham Lot Cave, a place where there are (reportedly) seriously impressive bird-related sights for the patient watcher.

There are actually three things that draw tourists to Tham Lot. That's not to say that there are alot of tourists there -- it's not exactly in the itinerary of most visitors to Thailand, and while it's not remote, exactly, it's also not the simplest place to get to, located as it is 7 miles up a windy disintegrating mountain road from a fairly minor village along the northern highway. Once you get there, you have a choice of two guesthouses and there's really no other accomodation or indeed restaurant options unless you head back to the highway. Fortunately the guesthouses that do exist are delightful.

But I digress. The three tourist draws are the birds (of which there were 187 listed on a series of posters at Cave Lodge, including the Red Whiskered Bulbul, the Chestnut-headed Bee-eater, and the White-rumped Sharma); the scenery and villages to which you can hike; and Tham Lot itself. "Tham" in Thai means "cave", and if there's any accuracy to Thai nomenclature, "Lot" ought to mean "humongous and unbearably stinky".

A visit to the Tham Lot cave takes over an hour and requires a guide with a very powerful lantern. This place was big, confusing, and had caverns on multiple levels reached by climbing alarmingly steep wooden staircases. And did I mention the river? You can actually raft or kayak through the whole thing. We walked through the first couple of caverns then hopped on a bamboo raft to get the full effect, with the poor driver actually pushing the raft from behind and helpfully pointing his flashlight at the ceiling whenever there was a particularly large bat community gathered. My verdict -- bats make annoying squeaky noises and they don't exactly smell like a flower garden.

You may think that I have once again digressed from my original point (birdwatching, in case you've forgotten), but in fact I have not, I am right on top of things here. Because we cleverly timed our little trip to the cave to coincide with another major tourist attraction -- the nightly return of thousands of swifts to this very cave. As our bamboo raft approached the downstream exit of Tham Lot, it became increasingly obvious that while the bat-only sections of the cave were no walk in a perfume factory, they were a veritable paradise compared to the caverns in which the swifts nested. Holy mother of pearl, was it awful. Seriously, the stench was so powerful in some places we began to debate the necessity of breathing. The distasteful aspects of this were compounded as we began exploring this final cavern with our guide, and realized that despite the uneven ground we could touch absolutely nothing. Every surface, including the stairs and their potentially life-saving railings, were encased in a toxic paste made of guano and feathers. After an interesting, if icky, tour of nearby caves in which the coffins of ancient civilizations remain, we returned to the cave opening for 10 minutes of deep breathing and yet another personal vow to avoid all caves, no matter how impressive. Unless gas masks and tanks of lilac-scented oxygen are distributed at the entrance.

OK, you've been very patient, and this is where I explain why I could never be a birdwatcher. We were told (misinformed) by our guide that the swifts would be flying in at 6 pm, which would translate into a perfectly doable 15 minutes wait. Thirty minutes later and there were still only a couple hundred swifts flying around and cruelly teasing us by having one or two peel off and jet into the cave every so often. A multi-family group of Dutch tourists arrived and reported that the real swift ETA was 6:30. So we waited. Mind you, I had no book with me due to my previous sodden experience with bamboo rafts. I suppose it's conceivable that I could be a birdwatcher if I could spend the majority of the downtime with a good book, but I'm thinking that birdwatching most likely requires "watching". By 6:30 I was pretty board with staring at the sky.

At 6:35 we started to get some real action. Hundreds of birds swirled and darted around in the darkening sky outside the cave entrance It was controlled chaos, as if they were preparing to form into a "he went thataway" arrow to tip off Elmer Fudd as to Bugs Bunny's whereabouts. Soon groups started swooping into the cave, and let me just say that these birds are well named. They're amazing flyers, are extremely quick and can practically make 90 degree turns. It really was fun to watch.

AS entertaining as it was, after 15 minutes of staring I felt I had the gist of it and was quite ready to head back to Cave Lodge for dinner and a big icy Beer Chang. We had been standing in the opening of this stinky cave for over an hour, and apparently the American couple I went with shared my attention span issues. As we approached the end of the path to the parking lot we crossed a bridge from which we could see our original upstream cave entrance, and were informed by more lounging Dutchmen that at any moment thousands more birds would arrive from their workday in Burma and simultaneously go home to roost with National Geographic quality precision and scope. So we sat down again to wait.

At this point, a true birdwatcher would have had no problem waiting for the Burmese contingent. After all, this is probably a pretty impressive bird sight, and the description of it sounds pretty cool for sure. I, on the other hand, was very figety, and had a great deal of trouble keeping my mind off my impending sweat-and-guano-removing shower and chicken coconut curry. So we left. Yes, we left with perhaps only minutes to wait for the amazing onslaught of Burmese swifts.

I am a bad tourist, and a worse birdwatcher, but the curry was fantastic, and the Beer Chang really hit the spot.


Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 1:16 AM