Chirping like rats, bats cling to the cave ceiling in their thousands. The stuffy air smells of earth. Spiders as large as tarantulas blunder in the dark, and fat toads gape silently at us from the most hidden rocks. For all the scariness of this underground world, lit up by our headlamps, there’s something intriguing about Nam Ta Lu, or Water Through Cave.

Exploring this 800m-long cave near Rajjaprabha Dam, which translates to Light of the Kingdom, is the first of several adventures surrounding a stay in Cheow Lan Lake’s floating bungalows. The artificial lake sits in Surat Thani’s Khao Sok National Park – a rainforest older than the Amazon.

As for Surat Thani, most travellers to southern Thailand dismiss the province and city as nothing more than a jumping-off point to Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao. Wrongfully so! Surat Thani abounds with on- and off-the-beaten-path attractions that tour groups rarely visit, from exciting cave tours and scarcely known lookouts to authentic riverside markets.

I’ve previously written about the Khao Na Nai Luang Dharma Park (also known as Thamma Park). Picture golden pagodas and red, laterite stupas that sit enthroned on karst peaks overlooking palm and rubber plantations as far as the eye can see. But Surat Thani province offers many more surprises. Here are some of the highlights:

Cheow Lan Lake

Back inside Nam Ta Lu, I am standing in cool, chest-high water. I can’t help staring at the millennia-old stalactites, clusters glistening in all their beauty like snow sparkles. “They grow about one millimetre in two years. If you touch them, they die,” says our guide Green, referring to the hundreds of awe-inspiring stalactites and stalagmites in the cave.

Looking up, listening to the dripping sounds of water rich in mineral lime, he adds that the cave looked nicer six to seven years ago before tourists touched and destroyed a lot of them. I still find them fascinating. Some of these long pieces of rock, hanging from the ceiling and sticking up from the cave floor, have met and joined to become columns after hundreds of thousands of years.

Green tells me to tell those behind me to let everyone behind them know how to tackle the narrow, half-metre-wide passages, with their buttocks touching the cave wall and their hands and feet pushing the wall on the other side. We have to beware of sharp rocks. Voices echo as refreshing water splashes down this aptly named Water Through Cave. The stream flowing through it the entire year characterises Nam Ta Lu, with a water depth that depends on the vagaries of weather. 

Leaving behind the bat colonies, which feed on spiders, insects, and frogs, we tread water to keep afloat, occasionally having to swim, and follow the bubbling brook. After this one hour and 45 minutes thrill, our group of some 20 travellers re-emerge into daylight and thick jungle.

The Nam Ta Lu adventure may not suit many older travellers because it requires a resasonably good level of fitness and ability to swim. But Cheow Lan Lake offers other more sedate experiences that will appeal to those looking to do things at a slower pace. Staying overnight in a floating bungalow on the lake provides an opportunity to enjoy a sunset or early morning cruise – or both if you have the energy.

Twilight is about to fall as we head out for the sunset cruise on this emerald lake. I catch the tung wood scent of the longtail boat as the warm wind dishevels my hair. Some people are still trying to play the ‘flute’, bamboozling and blowing the bamboo stalks that Green cut for us earlier. The relentless ‘beeeeeeeeep’ of invisible chirpers, the cicadas, is an omnipresent background noise.

High above us, an eagle flaps its wings. Save for the cicadas, the exotic bird named doi hoi in Thai – making ‘dag dag’ sounds in the distance – and the multiple tones of bamboo whistles, it’s pretty quiet. While it’s partly cloudy, spoiling the perfect sunset, people sit entranced by this beautiful lake, studded with limestone pillars that jut hundreds of metres out of green-tinted waters.

As darkness descends, we head back to our floating bungalows. “Have sun, electricity come,” says a Thai woman who is a member of staff, and laughs. They use solar-powered electricity here in the daytime and diesel power generators in the evening – though not until late.

Sitting on my bamboo bungalow’s veranda with an uncharged phone, I listen to the chirping crickets, collecting my thoughts. If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether I’m in a floating bungalow or a shack on land. The lake’s water is totally calm, gurgling beneath my hut only when someone walks by.

A frog jumps right in front of me, unimpressed by the starlit sky. In preparation for their early morning cruise, most fellow travellers, about 20 people in each of the three groups, have already gone to bed. Safe in the knowledge that no rooster will wake me at an ungodly hour, I soak up this once-in-a-lifetime experience a little longer and bed down at around midnight.

Happy gibbons wake me at 6 am, announcing that the weather isn’t too hot. I love how their calls echo in the bay of Khlong Pae, a wide inlet within Cheow Lan Lake. The name of the bay translates to ‘many canals coming together.’ Everyone rushes to breakfast so as not to miss the morning cruise. I lie in instead, enjoying the pleasant draft sneaking in beneath the bamboo window.

The silence people leave behind is priceless. There are only the songs of blackbirds and the doi hoi, making sounds unique to the jungle, plus red dragonflies lingering on my veranda. Hearing fish splash their tails at the surface before diving down, I let my mind flow before grabbing a canoe.

Seated in this yellow, open deck boat, I venture out on my own, paddling to move forward in Khlong Pae Bay’s warm, 30m-deep emerald water. Looking up, I hear rustling in the trees and the cracking of twigs growing louder. Eventually, I see monkeys, though I can’t tell whether these are macaques or gibbons in the treetops.

I love the fresh air and the soothing ‘boop-boop-boop’ sounds of a crow pheasant. In the distance, crows scream to communicate threats.

If you’re looking to become one with nature – this is it! Rajjaprabha Dam, with its vast artificial lake, provides peaceful moments to hold dear. And with its jungle-clad limestone monoliths sculpted by the same tectonic shift that created the Himalayas, Cheow Lan Lake is a sight to behold.

Pra Cha Rat Floating Market

‘Until Then,’ a dreamy song by Thai indie rock band, Tilly Bird, comes from speakers at Wat Bang Bai Mai, the subdistrict’s temple near Pra Cha Rat floating market, just 3.5km from Surat Thani’s city centre. The song is followed by announcements in Thai. Locals are up and about, bantering on this cloudy morning at 9 am. And I, still half asleep, catch the scents of deep-fried chicken and freshly cut pineapples, traipsing in a roofed industrial-looking section near the tiny bridge.

Unlike the floating market of Damnoen Saduak near Bangkok, which sits in a 32-kilometre-long canal with about 600 longtail boats per day, Pra Cha Rat is manageable with some 220 stalls, a handful of boats pulling up along the riverbank, and about 2,500 visitors every Sunday. This is the only day of the week when the community market is open.

Bang Bai Mai’s administrative management started Pra Cha Rat – more a riverside than a floating market – seven years ago to expand the subdistrict’s community tourism. While it’s been a success, it’s still blissfully uncrowded in the morning because most people rock up at noon.

Stroll along 1.5m-wide paths along nipa-roofed bamboo shacks, and warm-hearted smiles and Thai desserts are yours. Khanom bueang (crispy pancake) is irresistibly sweet, as is khao tom mat, soft and sticky rice with a banana filling. Other local specialities include khai nok kra ta – fried partridge eggs served in a krathong, a lotus-shaped banana leaf boat.

As I feast my way around these narrow paths amid a humid jungle, I soak up the ‘cheeup-cheeup-cheeup’ sounds of the ever-present tailorbird. I can’t help noticing the gondoliers, calmly rowing Venetian style down a 450m-long, bai jak-lined passage.

Sitting at Kor Jaak Café by the Bang Bai Mai river, a tributary of Surat’s Ta Pi river, I can hear the cracking sounds of tung wood as boatmen propel their gondolas, plus the wind rustling in the stemless nipa palms. I decide to buy a duck soup with Chinese herbs, mushrooms, goji berries and chicken blood clots, and take it to Noen Nora Hill to consume.

Noen Nora Hill

Located on a hilltop away from the clamour of traffic, Noen Nora is a vantage point 8.5 km southwest of Surat Thani’s City Pillar Shrine. While it features a pink, heart-shaped arch that makes for enchanting pictures, its true appeal is in the tranquil atmosphere amid clusters of exotic trees, where red-eyed cuckoos pipe up and tailorbirds chirp.

A local who relaxes in one of the observation pavilions there has come for the views of Surat Thani City. And I, lapping up the sun and the calming calls of a greater coucal, fuel up with my soup for the one-hour scooter ride to my next stop – a fan-shaped rock known as Hin Pad in Khiri Rat Nikhom District.

Hin Pad

Google Maps is unreliable in this remote location. There’s nothing here apart from neatly aligned rubber plantations and bush, plus a paved road meandering through the rainforest. I continue to ride up and down the hilly landscape and ask a few locals tapping rubber for directions. They know where Hin Pad is but tell me to ask others when I reach some left turn because it isn’t around the corner.

Overtaking a Thai woman riding her motorcycle, I wave her down. True to Surat Thani’s meaning – City of Good People – she offers to take me to that left turn signposted ‘Hin Pad Forest @ Baanyuansao’. Within minutes, I arrive.

Surrounded by cacti beauties, flax plants and rubber trees, Hin Pad sits in the middle of the jungle. The unique pull of this fascinating, eight-metres-high rock – 20 metres in circumference – is how it defies gravity, and the peacefulness of everything around it. Think gushing sounds of a waterfall, and the forest sounds of crow pheasants, tailorbirds, and the doi hoi.

Eh, a Thai woman in her early 60s, calls this place home. She turns up out of the blue, nods to a roofed open-air level overlooking karst peaks covered in mist and says it’s available for camping. It reminds me of my adventure at the Khao Na Nai Luang Dharma Park. Both Hin Pad and Khao Na Nai Luang Dharma Park are about as far away from the tourist crowds as you can get in the province.

Header image: © Apple Kullathida. All other images: © Philipp Meier