Suriya and Kasat: Full Team Revisited Ep.III

By 5 pm. most of our camp has been set up at the Lang-ka Ranger Station by the Kasa river. I and Chaiwut have been here before but all others team members have not. So we walked up the river to survey the area. By the time we came back, after about half an hour, all of the orchid team was standing in the middle of the river looking up at the large tree where more than 10 species of orchids covering the trunk like a luxuries fur coat. We joined them and learnt more about orchid than we did the whole life.

The last ray of light still penetrated the canopy. We dived the Kasa with our snorkel gears to find many species of fishes living in this pristine river. There were a lot of Spiny eel –Mastacenbelus armata-, Loaches were dominated by Schistura. There were at least 4 species of them, S. vinciguerrae, S. robertsi, S. aff. perculi and S. aff. Kohchangensis. The later 2, I and Chaiwut discovered since our last visit and the last has been confirmed to be an un-described species. The Cyprinids included Devario, Scaphiodonichthys, Tor and Neolissochilus. There were 2 species of Garra, the Redtail and the other greenish blown with mottled body. We havn’t yet figured out which species they were since Garra is a very large and complex genus.

It was getting dark. I looked up the sky passed through the Bamboo canopy to find no sign of star. The sky, it appeared, has been covered with thick layer of cloud. The Orchid team was better equipped to deal with rain as they have large tents, while ours were rather small. We had dinner while listening to the thunder storm rambling from a far. By the time we finished, the first drop of rain has hit my face. We decided to move our tent up into the Ranger head quarter. This sounded big and formal but it was in fact a medium size hut made of concrete foundation and bamboo structure, large enough to barely fit 5 of our small tents, a bed room and a food storage room for the lone ranger.

So much for our plan to survey the reptile in the area, 6 of us just sat there looked at each others and were entertained briefly by the appearance of a little Widow gecko –Hemidactylus garnotti. This species being name as such, because the female are parthenogenesis meaning it can laid viable eggs with out male. As far as we know, there has not been any record of a male in Thailand. This one was also a female.

By 10 pm. the rain has let up but the forest was still very wet. 4 members of the team, me included, decided to call it a day and get into our tents, while the other 2 –Gui and Ton- still have some energy left and decided to explore the nocturnal creatures, which later proved rather excited!

“Onn Onn Onn! (=Bamboo rat)” Before I went into my deep sleep, I heard Ton yelled from somewhere in the perimeter of the forest. I quickly grabbed my camera and flashlight to join them. After a few minutes all of us were surrounding the poor Bamboo rat who must have been surprise by its sudden stardom. We took a lot of pictures of the rat before let it got back on its way. Ton, who was the one who found the rat, didn’t get a single decent picture due to some malfunction of his camera, as he claimed it, although we all believed that it was more of the User Error.

Friday, April 8, 2006

“Onn! Where?” Our local guide asked us in the morning when we told him about the last night incident. “We took some pictures of it and let it go” I told him. He looked obviously upset and told us that there are not many foods that can beat the Bamboo rat-on-a-stick!

This morning we traveled up north, penetrated deeper into the jungle, where we would picked up a local Karen at Jakae village –an old Karen settlement in the middle of the sanctuary. We had to park our trucks in the middle of the jungle and climbed a small lime-stone ridge before we got to the Suriya river. This person, would take care of our trucks while we were at the Suriya.