Waterfalls

The good news is that I made it to Erawan National Park today and it was beautiful. The bad news is that the SPOT update I sent from there didn't go out. I don't know what the problem is, but it's looking like those updates are going to be pretty sporadic.

Erawan National Park is known for the Seven Steps Waterfalls, but rather than "steps," it's more like tiers. You walk up a path, around a corner or two, sometimes down some actual steps, and then you're at the next tier. On tiers one and two you are likely to see monkeys swinging through the trees or, more likely, trying to steal something from an unattended bag. That's what this guy was trying to do, but at least the park rangers give you fair warning. :-)

(Beware a monkey steal your belonging.)

I only made it to tier five before I had to turn back; I was worried that I'd miss the last bus back to Kanchanaburi and considering the park is 140km away, that wouldn't have been good! Besides, I wanted to make sure that I actually got to swim on a couple of tiers instead of just rushing through them to get to the top.

I don't think I mentioned here before that you can get fish massages in Bangkok. Essentially you stick your feet in a tub of water and lots of little fishes nibble at the dead skin on your toes. I'd thought about trying it and then just never got around to it. Why do I mention it now? Well, because I got my fish massage after all! I first got into the water on tier five and after I noticed how COLD the water was, the next thing I noticed were the fish. It's quite a shocker when you're standing there and then all of a sudden you feel a little. . .something on your toes and you look down and you realize the fish are nibbling on you. It's been described as ticklish little kisses, but to me it just felt very weird and I let out a giggling little scream every time. Luckily, it seems only the little fish do the nibbling because some of the others are so big it looks like they'd eat an entire toe!

Tier four was fun, too, because it had two big rock slides. Here's me coming out of the pool after going down one of them. Be sure to check out the rest of the waterfall pics by clicking over there on the right.