With more than 100 national parks, Thailand offers a veritable menu of adventures. Its Rainforest Camp is 20 safari-style tents each floating on a platform above Cheow Lan Lake in the heart of Thailand’s largest virgin rainforest. A jigsaw of limestone crags line the southern coasts, touching emerald-blue waters. Inland, you’ll find forests cloaking waterfalls, rare orchids and, occasionally, elephants. The floating restaurant serves a buffet of freshly cooked Thai curries and salads. At night, nothing disturbs you save the click of cicadas, and you’re woken by the screech of gibbons at dawn. With all that choice, our Thailand specialists share their experiences to help you find the right park for you. You can watch a bat exodus in Khao Yai, snorkel with reef sharks in Ang Thong and hike to a cave temple in Khao Sam Roi Yot – and that’s just for starters. Many can be combined for an in-depth nature tour, or contrasted with time exploring a city or downtime on the beach. Most Thai national parks have places to stay nearby to avoid building on protected parkland. In Khao Sok, Elephant Hills has come up with an alternative solution. Each tent has its own balcony: you can jump straight into the turquoise waters for a swim, or paddle out across the lake in your personal kayak.

The park itself was thrust up from the ocean millions of years ago, when the collision of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates forced a hunk of the seafloor to rise. The camp is best visited as part of a two-night, three-day experience run by Elephant Hills, with a night at its sister property, Elephant Hills Tented Camp. Other activities you can join include guided hikes, kayak tours and a visit to a cave-dwelling bat colony. Here, you can help to feed and wash the resident elephants, which are being rehabilitated after working in the logging industry. This has crafted a landscape that veers from lowland scrub. Elephant Hills’ representatives will meet you in the airport for the three-hour drive to the Elephant Hills Tented Camp for your first night. Cobalt-blue waterways to sheer limestone crags crowned with rainforest. After your stay, you’re well located to head onward to the beach, with both Krabi and Khao Lak within three hours’ reach. From Bangkok, it’s an hour-and-a-half flight to Phuket on Thailand’s southwest coast. The guides will tell you that it’s more ecologically diverse than the Amazon.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve journeyed across Thailand, and after trekking through numerous national parks, I didn’t think there was much left to surprise me. Ruam Thai village is a farming community, where a series of pineapple and rubber plantations brush against the national park boundary. My hosts were keen to talk about daily life in rural Thailand. From the village, you’re driven in an open-top 4×4, accompanied by your guide and local ranger, into the evergreen forests and grasslands of the Tenasserim Hills. But a trip to Kui Buri National Park left me awestruck. Huai Luek Wildlife Watching Area is the last stop, and the farthest you can travel into the park. You might also spot the muscly gaur (the largest bovine in the world) or packs of golden jackals. Historically, there has been conflict between the farmers and elephants eager to score a free snack, National Park at Mae Ai – vacation.thaibounty.com – – published here https://vacation.thaibounty.com/holidays/15-greatest-hotels-on-koh-samui/ – and you can see a community project that enables villagers to live side-by-side with their neighbours. My guide was eager to point out that my sighting wasn’t unique. Access is limited to a set route in the northeast of this little-visited park, near the village of Ruam Thai. In total the park protects around 320 wild elephants, the largest concentration in Thailand, and it’s the only place where you’re likely to see a wild herd. At the village you can lunch with a local family. They explained how they were adapting their farming methods to warn elephants away safely, including the network of glass bottles they’d installed that jangle if the beasts get too close. Down in the long grass, I could see a herd exceeding 40 elephants, the tiny young tucked under their mothers. There are a number of points where the vehicle is allowed to stop, and you can clamber out to look for broken branches or dung: a sign that Kui Buri’s largest inhabitants have passed by. Later, I toured the village and was shown a stilted hut where the farmers take it in turns to sleep out above the crops, shining lights to ward off curious elephants. The hilltop viewpoint looks down into a wide, open valley. You’d be unlucky not to see elephants here.

Vacations In Mae Hong Son

On the outskirts of Ban Rai, Baan Rai Kong Mun is a locally owned guesthouse. A hotel where art photography hangs on the walls and the furniture looks straight out of a postmodern design studio, SO Sofitel Hua Hin is on a quiet stretch of sand on the outskirts of the village. Translated as the ‘mountain of 300 peaks’, Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park is a jumble of limestone peaks that jut up from an expansive stretch of wetland like the teeth of a giant beast. The pavilion was built in 1890 for the visit of King Chulalongkorn, and many Thai kings have since followed suit. While simple, each room has hot water, air conditioning and Wi-Fi. From the nearby village of Bang-Pu, my guide and I caught a motorboat, and cruised along the coast to land on one of the park’s beaches. The quiet fishing village of Cha Am is a two-hour drive from Bangkok, on Thailand’s east coast. The heart of the park is a honeycomb of caves and sinkholes, including its calling card: the Phraya Nakhon Cave. Running along Thailand’s central-east coast, the park is edged with crescents of unspoiled white beach. There’s no restaurant, but you can have dinner with a local family, and breakfast at a nearby ranger station with views across the park. From Bangkok, it’s a four-hour drive down the coast to Ruam Thai village. A stay here combines well with a visit to Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park, detailed below, an hour’s drive away. From the cave, you can walk back down to the beach for lunch in a small sand-in-your-toes restaurant, or to swim or walk along the coast. From here we climbed up, along the limestone cliffs and around the headland, where the views stretch out across the Gulf of Thailand. The roof of this huge cavern is open to the elements, and if you enter at just the right time (between 10am and 11am) rays of sunlight flood in, glinting on the gilded Kuha Kharuehat Pavilion that stands on a rise on the cave floor. I suggest a day tour of the park with a guide, as while the trails are well-established, the jungle is dense in parts and there’s a fair bit of clambering involved.

1. All hallways equipped with sprinklers
2. Emergency back-up generators
3. Sightseeing tours
4. Vegetarian food available
5. Individually controlled ventilation in 569 rooms
6. Emergency information
7. Hotel-owned car park
8. TV remote control

Khao Sam Roi Yot is a one-and-a-half-hour drive south. Continuing our journey to Khao Luk Chang Bat Cave, we stopped once more as a porcupine shuffled slowly by. We’d been halted by a thick log stretching out across the road. My 4×4 stopped in the middle of the forest, just as the sun was beginning to set. We were headed to the nightly bat exodus, where more than three million wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bats pour out into the night sky (it takes about 40 minutes for the cave to empty) as they attempt to avoid the hovering bat hawks. The wildlife in Thailand’s first national park has plenty of time and space to flourish. And, that’s why I recommend Khao Yai: there’s wildlife everywhere. You’ll need a guide to help you navigate the trails, as well as a park ranger who can help spot the more illusive wildlife. Rather than moving it, my guide suggested we wait. Peer downward and you might spot the shocking pink dragon millipede or shiny pill bugs. Clamber up the Nong Phak Chi Watchtower to view a pond. In the daytime, the park is best explored by hiking some of the 50 km (31 miles) of trails. The log, we discovered, as it began to slip away into the undergrowth, was a fully grown reticulated python. Walking through the evergreen forest and tall grasslands, you’re often surrounded by the screeching of macaques or gibbons, while great hornbills glide above.