5 friends. One Place: Thailand

Usually, when one feels isolated, lost and disconnected from the world, it is a fact one should be worried about. Even more when you find yourself surrounded by only few people who, to make matters worse, don’t share your language. Not one single word.

But what if I told you that all of this happened to me and a group of five friends in Khao Sok (Thailand)? What If I told you that Khao Sok is a national park with a big lake in the middle of the country where some natives still live in some floating wooden apartments? Well, maybe that feeling would immediately turn into something big and grateful.

Yes. There we were. Consciously lost in the middle of nowhere. A beautiful nowhere full of water, mountains and super high and tiny trees, as if they wanted to reach the sky. And us. And them. A native family that kindly hosted us, making us live one of the best experiences of our lives.

Eating the marinated fish that we were swimming with a few minutes before (delicious, by the way). Recollecting mushrooms in that jungle, where the silence is mixed up with the noisy tweet of birds. A jungle where the most poisonous snake of Thailand freely spends its days. We were lucky, obviously, not to have the pleasure of seeing it.

We spent the evenings kayaking around the lake, as if we were trying to know every nook and cranny of it. Breathing pure oxygen. And the best part: that haunted sunset seen from our floating apartment. Being there was just an incredible experience, not payable with money. Simply crazy.

But even crazier was the journey there. First, a random car took us to the middle of a random forest. From there, we got a random but colorful bus that drove us to a random edge of the lake. With improvised sign language, and after coffees and hours, we got the chance to meet someone who took us to that floating village.

Two words: magical and green. Magical because honestly, that boat trip seemed to be the genuine inspiration of the movie Avatar, with those sharp hillocks coming from the water with force as trying to meet the clouds. It was so much like that. Breathtaking. Green because the climate of Thailand is warm, wet and moody. The warm sea that surrounds the country plus its location (the so-called Intertropical Convergence Zone), make this an area of ascending air which turns into heavy rainfall during the wet season (from May until September).

As you can see, sometimes being lost in the middle of nowhere can be exactly the place you want to be.