I don’t know what time it was when everyone started stirring – I was certainly awake anyway. I asked Charlotte if she had managed to sleep. “Oh yeah”, she said, as if she’d never slept this well before in her entire life. The train eventually pulled into Trang station and we took a very overloaded tuktuk to the Trang Hotel. After lunch the next stop on the tour was the Thale Noi Bird Sanctuary, where we had several hours bird watching from a dragon boat that whizzed around lotus-covered lakes. About half an hour in, the birds were losing their appeal for me, though Steve and Sue were glued to their binoculars. I was more interested in the boat, which was able to skip over poles, ropes and nets at high speed thanks to it’s slender design and propeller that is several metres behind the boat itself.

There were also some strangely elaborate fishing machines that caught my attention. They were of an ingenious design – you can see a picture of one above.

In the late afternoon we made a brief visit to a cave temple discovered by a monk after seeing it in a dream. The monk resolved to develop the cave into a temple, and so it has tiled floors, stairs and lighting which make it very accessible, although the occassional bat reminded me that it was really a natural formation. We followed the passages through to a magnificent jungle opening, where the continual drip-drip noice of the cave was suddenly mixed with the varied and musical sounds of the jungle.