30 mins. South of Chiang Mai city, Hang Dong district.
This place gorgeous, and it's tucked away from everyone. Shh! Well, I'm telling you about it because we all deserve to see what a beautiful speck of earth this spot is. It's a smaller national park, and it's main feature is a small river that has carved out some gorgeous rocks. It's perfect for picnicking, hiking, swimming and camping, and there are VERY few people here. It's free. CAMPING IS FREE! It's a phenomenal spot.
In the dry season the waters are clear and shallow, and are perfect for a swim. You can walk up the river for quite a while, and there are some beautiful deeper swimming spots along the way.
In the wet season, please don't go. Flash floods happen here, just about every season. The canyon walls are high in some places and it would be a very dangerous situation if you were near the riverbank.
Ob Khan shores are full of sparkles. The river rock is carved out to show the path of each eddy. There are some massive round holes, some big enough to sit in! As we walked further up the river, each little swim spot got better and better. We jumped off rocks and sunbathed on big boulders lining the river.
At one point up the river, the canyon rises and the entire river squeezes through a tiny opening just big enough for a body to float through! So sure enough, that's what we did. We jumped in the deep fjord-like section before the opening, tried scaling the walls with our bare feet and continuously fell in before riding the current through the little opening that spits us out on the sandy beach it opens up to.
We camped and we cooked on a perfect little plot of soft sand, not a far walk up from the ranger station. We made a small cooking fire by the river, fashioned some chairs from stumps, and cooked a real campfire-style dinner of ramen loaded with veggies and eggs. I think it was the best dinner I ever ate. We also had chocolate, beer, and coffee and oatmeal for the morning, which we made over a new fire in the morning. WE WIN!
I have to mention....spiders. There are more spiders here than I've ever seen in one place, in my life. Ever. HOLY there were so many spiders, that I no longer think I'm afraid of spiders! Let's just say that all these spiders are harmless.
The spiders were discovered by a walk taken after dark to collect firewood. I notice a tiny shiny light reflecting on the ground, that I suspected was a piece of glass, or maybe even a lizard eye. I ignored the first little sparkle, then soon came upon another and asked Rus if he was seeing it too. Those are SPIDER EYES, and once we noticed a couple, then we noticed them all.
There were hundreds, and they were everywhere. We stalked one to find out that their bodies are slightly bigger than the palm of your hand. Now most people would GTFO (get the fuck out) by now, but we like to think that we are brave, and we noticed that they're scared of us, so we accepted our proper place in nature's hierarchy.
We sucked it up and built a bigger fire. Upon building a fire, we noticed that some of the small species of spiders were surfacing because of the heat from their safe homes under the sand. I had to abandon my barefoot ways and reconsider whether we were staying for a second night. How we survived the millions of spiders and still had a wonderful time is beyond me.
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