The Mangroves

I knew we were going to enjoy this part of the holiday and that it would be a good  chance to relax!  Despite this, I was awake at 5.45 this morning and ready to watch the sun rise over the forest on the other side of the river.  To facilitate this, the hotel staff slip silently down to your tent at about 5.30 to deliver a flask of hot water, for tea/coffee and some homemade biscuits wrapped in a banana leaf.  They know that this is a ritual that many seem to slip into whilst here and this morning was well worth getting up for.  We could have laid in bed and seen most of nature’s spectacular show but it was best enjoyed from the platform outside the tent, watching the tiger fish swim by and seeing the whole sky lit up orange by the rising sun.  Beautiful.

I sat and caught up on some of these blog posts whilst Corinne went back to bed for a bit.  By 8.30 am it was time for some breakfast and to get ourselves ready for a trip out to see the Mangroves and have a picnic lunch on the water.  Breakfast was taken under the shade of a palm tree, with a table set in the sand.. This is how to live!   Prawn noodles for me, for breakfast and Corinne had the same but with pork.  The coffee here is locally grown and very good too, so now we are set for the day ahead.

At 10am we board the boat to take us to the mangroves but first we stop off on the other side of the river to see a local village and the school that some of the money from the hotel supports.  We walk through a path in the forest and into the village, which has some surprisingly modern looking buildings in amongst the traditional huts on stilts and the rather decaying ‘temple’ but intact with a gold painted Buddha.  We are there just as the children are coming out of school and are surrounded by primary aged children all waving and saying ‘hello’ in perfecting English!  We bought some banana chips from the little village ’shop’, a shack outside the school grounds that is community run and also there to teach the children about shopping – they are having to start to live in a more modern World but their parents will probably not have visited a proper shop many times before and are largely self reliant for food. They trade for clothes and make what little furniture they have so there is really no need. We meet the boat a little upstream and continue on to the mangroves about an hour away.

We head into a sheltered area of the mangroves and tie up to a suitable branch. From here we are going to kayak through some of the smaller channels in the mangroves, so with some help from our guide we gingerly climb over the side of the boat and board the kayaks that have been dragged behind us for the last hour.  Two to a Kayak – we had another couple on the tour with us – we head off into the mangrove channels.  This is welcome relief from the intense heat and sun but also gets us closer to nature.  We stop for a rest and the guide explains the importance of Mangroves, not only in the local ecosystem but also the part they play on the World stage.  Mangroves are as important as the rainforest in terms of the carbon sink that they offer but also the biodiversity that they support is huge, from providing nursery areas for smaller fish, fry and small mammals to habitats that protect bird life and an abundance of other flora and fauna. The importance of Mangroves cannot be overstated in the race to reverse climate change.

Back at our boat and a slightly inelegant boarding from the kayaks, we were expecting a picnic lunch somewhere next.  What we actually had was our guide whipping out a gas stove on the boat and making lunch for us whilst we chatted, bobbing about in the Thati river, mountains on one side and forest on the other. What a great spot for lunch, without another human being in sight.  Our guide rustled up spring rolls and vegetables and rice, as ordered but hot instead of the expected cold picnic!  We followed this with plates of egg yolk banana (we’ve come to love these little bananas, so called because they are bright yellow, like an egg yolk) and watermelon, expertly prepared onboard too.

Lunch over, we head back to the hotel having learnt a little more about the important ecological work they are taking part in to protect the environment here as well as run a hotel.   I’m starting to think that eco aware tourism is a good way forward for the future of travel.

After the obligatory afternoon swim in the slightly brackish river – we are at a point in the river where the salt water from the Gulf of Thailand comes back up the river in the dry season to meet the freshwater coming downriver.  It’s saltier in the dry season but during the rainy season the freshwater from the mountains pushes this back to make the river freshwater again – we relax on our deck before getting ready for dinner.

Our order for dinner is taken around 4pm and we are told that there is, if we want to take part, a short video shown by the staff of some of the conservation going on in the area and pictures from the camera traps that are put up to  monitor the wildlife in the area.  A lot of these are kept secret as the authorities don’t wan’t hunters and poachers to know where the animals are being tracked.  We saw pictures of Civet, Deer, Cloud Leopards, River Otters and Fishing Cats.  These have all been caught with camera traps in the area in which we are staying.  Also recorded but unphotographed are Pangolin, Elephant, Monkey and Porcupine together with an abundance of bird life. Having taken all this in, we were invited to go on a short trip up the river, in the dark, to watch fireflies in the trees before dinner.

I have to say, you have not lived unless you have watched fireflies, in the dead calm of the night, from a boat.  It was magical watching little pulses of light ripple through the canopy of the forest close to the river bank! What an experience.

We were less than five minutes away from the hotel and by the time we had returned, dinner was ready to be served.