It was time to turn south, so we headed for Khlong Wang Chao National Park, an hour south of Tak. This quiet park had a picturesque camping spot right on the river, and being a weekday was very quiet. We also had the waterfall to ourselves (again) so I took advantage to get some shots.
After a solid night’s sleep, it was time to decamp and head to ‘Chong Yen,’ a campsite at a peak over 1,300 meters high in the Mae Wong National Park that has become very popular with Thai netizens, vloggers and the recently spawned generation of nouveau riche campers.
Places that are hard to get to, such as this, need to be booked in advance with the National Parks Authority. But the Thai government being what it is, this is not easy and involves a Kafkaesque procedure of navigation, form filling, booking, and provision of ID details through the state website, which barely functions, seemingly being designed in the 1990s. It also wanted us to physically go to the state bank to pay the 60 baht fee and get receipts and more paperwork – this was out of the question.
We drove to the park, not knowing whether we could ascend to the campsite. Still, we were permitted up following more paperwork, form filling, ticketing, payment of camping fees, and enthusiastic stamping by park officials. We were also advised to buy a spray for the persistent sandflies that were up the mountain but this turned out to be a placebo as I still got bitten.
The road up to the summit was surprisingly good but the tiny campsite was extremely popular and soon filled up with campers seeking the cooler climes. The woman at the miniature coffee shop told us that as many as 200 people sardine into this small triangle of grass at the summit during peak periods – there were about 15 tents there during our stay.
There is also a new generation of Thai YouTubers and Tiktokers that video, narrate, and post absolutely everything they see on social media. This adds to the popularity of these places and detracts from their attraction at the same time as they become overcrowded with more YouTubers and Tiktokers. The Insta-selfie crowd was also busy preening and posing, some of them oblivious to the cooler temperatures judging by how little they were wearing.
In addition to the social media freaks were several twitchers – bird-watching enthusiasts with serious camera gear trying to capture the rarer species that live up here.
A half-kilometer climb to the summit of Phu Sawan, 1,427 meters above sea level, rewarded us with a stunning sunset that evening.
There were no dogs at this campsite, but we did encounter a pair of wild porcupines that made their rounds of the site after dark, searching for food and opportunistic thievery of bags left outside of tents.
Sleeping in close proximity to a bunch of other tents didn’t come easily, especially after the previous peaceful places we’d camped at. Temperatures dropping to 14 degrees didn’t help, so we were up at sunrise and on the road down the mountain to head south again to the next campsite at Ban Rai.
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