Wake up music at 4:15am that was very loud – somewhere in the village on a huge loudspeaker for EVERYONE to hear!!! And its not like it was just for a few minutes, it went on for 3-4 hours. What the f***?? Did not put us in a good mood at all for the day.
I had booked a cycling tour (supposedly for the whole day) into the “jungle” to a waterfall) – a relatively short trip with only 30-odd km with a quick stop at some ancient (500 years old) jar/burial site – all this for 25$. Jörg planned to wander through town and take a relaxing day off.
The tour itself was quite short (started at 7:30am) – the guide could speak little English, but did his best – the jar site was a collection of who knows what jars – could have been anything, but the waterfall was wonderful – spent over an hour swimming in the pool in/under/around the waterfall – was certainly very pleasant.
Tried a whole bunch of different fruits and berries to try picked direct from the trees (I didn’t know that wild bananas have hard seeds in them – the mass-production version we get in stores seem to have had the seeds tuned out of them).
Had my packed lunch at 10am and then we headed back – I was done by noon (according to the description, should have 4pm….???). Jörgs experience was just as disappointing….
Later, after convincing the lady at the visitor center that we wanted to eat somewhere else (much to her disappointment and protest), we ended up at some guesthouse with “restaurant” – the owner of which we had a long chat with. He knew his way around bikes quite well – immediately identifies our bikes and the quality, that one was aluminum, one steel, estimated their value quite well, and we got to chatting…. He used to run the cycle tour part of the village, but was muscled out of the whole program by the visitor center that now does everything – it seems the visitor center (set up by the Wildlife Alliance) is trying to monopolize and control everything instead of encouraging people to set up their own businesses…
Anyway, we spent the evening on the porch of our Bungalow enjoying the sound of the crickets and other insects, drinking the beer (that we didn’t buy at the visitor center), and were glad to be leaving the next day….