Friday, August 29, 2008

Elephant Reserve




































One of the really cool things we got to do on our trip was to spend the night in a rain forest on a wild elephant reserve. We slept in a tree house connected to an elevated walkway deep in a rain forest in far southern China. The treehouse had a cement pole rising from the ground to hold it up. As we laid in bed, we could feel the treehouse rocking back and forth. I wasn't sure the treehouse would make it through the night without falling. The elevated walkway had signs telling you to keep moving because the walkway was "not load-bearing", which didn't make me feel to comfortable as I walked along it with a heavy backpack.

The wild elephants typically appear during the night in the area we were staying. If they appeared, a guard would wake us up. It rained a lot that night and the nearby stream the elephants like to frequent was well above normal level, which resulted in no appearances by the elephants. We did get to see a spider the size of my hand, which at one point was chilling out on Betina's pillow. It was an exciting scene as Matt and I hunted it down. It was a little hard to fall asleep knowing those large spiders were just cruising around. Jana also had a large cockroach take a perch on her ankle. I flicked it off of her and the thing came charging back at me.

The next morning was exciting as we had a visit from some wild monkeys. I was taking a picture of a walking stick and turned around to find these two monkeys hanging out just a foot away from me. I didn't know if I should be excited or scared. They decided I had nothing for them and moved on. Jana, Matt, and Betina were down the walkway further and fed apples to the monkeys.

The rain forest was simply an amazing and beautiful place. We got to see all sorts of wonderful things over the course of the 24 hours we spent there, and have lots of cool stories to share.

2 comments:

Kikiphotos said...

woowwww, beautiful pictures, and good holidays !

Christian (http://kikifotos.blogspot.com/)

David B Katague said...

I love your photos of the rain forest and the monkeys. Reminds me of some parts of Marinduque Island in the Philippines