PHUKRADUNG

It is impossible to spell “Phukadung” with the limited vowels in the Roman alphabet, so for a westerner to pronounce the name of the national park correctly –or at least more similarly to Thai- it helps to know the origin of the name. The tallest mountain in the area, the top of Phukadung is actually a plateau slopping down to the east. As the story goes, on any “wan pra” or Buddhist holiday, the bells being rung at all of the local Wats can be heard from the peak. Phu (pronounced poo) is the Thai word for mountain. “KRA-DUNG” is the sound of a holy bell. Pronouncing the name like the sound of a bell, instead of reading it English, is more like the actual Thai pronunciation.

In the distance, just under the sunlight breaking through the clouds, you can see the right side of a Phukadung. Only reachable by foot, Taraneh and I had to spend a night in the town below before hiking up the 1,288 M mountain early the next morning.

For all of Phukradung’s natural beauty, it is an oddly touristy national park. All along the hike up the mountain are different rest areas with restaurants offering simple rice dishes, fresh fruit and cold water. At the steepest sections of the hike, steel or rock stairways have been built, meaning you can hike the whole way without getting your hands dirty.

On our way to the top, Taraneh and I took a minute to rest and saw an elderly woman hike past us, cruising along with a walking stick in her right hand, and using a fan to cool her self with the left. Taraneh with asthma and my weak self being out of shape, we decided to befriend Grandma (that’s the nickname we gave her) and keep pace with her. She told me she was hiking up to her restaurant on the top, that she had been making the hike once a week for as long as she could remember.

Not much further down the trail our party grew again. A group of college kids from Bangkok had come to make the hike. Perhaps because of our good company or our slow but consistent pace, they stuck with us and like that, we went from two to ten.

Like our friends from Bangkok, larger groups scaling the mountain can hire others to carry up their packs for them. The rate was 30 Baht a kilogram. For this cheap price, a man or woman would strap your belongings to a bamboo pole and walk it up the mountain on their shoulders. These poor guys earned every Baht of their wage, slowly working their way up the nine kilometer hike one sure-footed step at a time.


When we reached the top in just over three hours our new acquaintances were good friends. Still over three kilometers from camp, we baked in the sun unshaded by the few tall trees.



Despite Phukradung’s touristy bits, it has conserved its natural beauty. The rainy season is the ideal time to go, when the fields are in bloom with thousands of flowers, the cool air giving distant views of the countryside, and the rainfall feeding several impressive waterfalls. Sadly, it is the cool season and we saw few flowers and all but one waterfall was dry. There were several advantages however. One, there were fewer tourists in the cool season, and two, without the rain, there were no leeches. Other than that, the animal life remained similar year round. We were kept away from different trails without guides because of wild elephants, and large deer, unafraid of humans, frequently walked around the campground.


After setting up our tent and having dinner at Grandma’s restaurant, we caught sunset at a cliff several kilometers away. We found a spot on a rock overhang and stared off into the countryside. Ice being a rare and expensive commodity, we drank warm beers as the sun fell below distant mountains. The alcohol going straight to my head, the sky was a living watercolor painting. The heat cast a haze over the sky, that made apparitions of the mountains in the distance, visible one minute then gone the next. In the valleys we saw only a carpet of treetops, spotted with the occasional shimmer of sunlight reflecting off a pond. When the sun fell out of our sight, we walked back under the last of the days light.

Before the sun had risen again, we woke early the next day to walk even further to the opposite side of the plateau for the sunrise. Unknown to us before the trip, that morning was a lunar eclipse and as we walked in the morning’s darkness we were watched the earth’s shadow slowly creep across the moon’s surface. In the stillness of the AM, we heard only the wind blowing across the plateau but we didn’t feel the breeze until we reached the edge. The moon no longer visible we, along with dozens of others, shivered in the darkness looking at our watches.

Slowly the trees became dark shadows against orange streaks appearing across the sky. As the orange warmed to red and shades of blue and the whites of clouds became visible, cameras began to flash. They didn’t stop, capturing snaps of every minute, every hue, every shade, until the sun had fully appeared and everyone turned off their cameras and left.

That day we set out on a hike with our college friends, a local Phukadung fanatic (he had climbed it 6 times already) and a professor who said he had climbed it so many times he had lost count. The professor led us around like a tour guide, telling us about the two-needle and three-needle pines, the rock orchid, the lichen that only grew in pristine, unpolluted areas, snapping group pictures at every major stop.

Along the hike we stopped to pray at a large Buddha image adorned with dozens of bells of different shapes and sizes. Further along we came to a pond famous for being the swimming hole of fairies of Thai lore. For lunch we found a dense forest bordering a small river and ate rice dishes Grandma made for us out of plastic bags. Eventually we reached the opposite cliff and hiked along it the rest of the way, stopping to rest where there were good views or plenty of shade.



The round trip was just over 20 kilometers. The half-way point of our trek was this cliff, a famous spot amongst Thais but little known to foreign tourists. Protected only by this warning and feeling the gusts of wind along the edge, I felt dizzy anywhere near the rock. Taraneh on the other hand walked right out to the edge and sat down as if it were impossible to slip and plummet to a horrible death below. I worked up the guts to this other ledge, a spot where wussies like me can still pose for a cool photograph.



After two straight days of hiking, we were spent. When the sun went down, we fell asleep. The next morning we slept in before gathering our things and hiking back down the hill.