South Thailand
3- A huge small mountain lake,
artifice, avatar and ... royal hydroelectricity
Going towards Lake Ratchaprapha,
... but do we know where it comes from?
This time, after a long bus journey, we find ourselves in the very north of the Province of Surat Thani, a region made up of low-lying mountains, between 300 and 1200 meters.
In Khao Sok National Park (the mountains Sok) nestles the huge water retention lake named Lake Ratchaprapha, also called Cheow Lan Lake. The lake is at an altitude of about 90 meters and the relief of the park rises to 980 meters. This relief accentuates the effect of the Monsoon; heavy rains then fall: 1.6 m / year.
Genesis of the reservoir
Rajjaprabha means "light of the kingdom" and owes its name to the inauguration ceremony of May 1987 by the king for his 60th birthday. Until then, the project was called "Cheow Lan Project".
The Thai Electricity Production Authority began in 1982 to divert the Khlong Saeng River (khlong = stream, channel), which comes from the north northwest, and to build the dam in the southeast of the area.
The power generation capacity will be of 350 GWatts.
The filling of the 185 km² basin lasts one year. The 385 families of the submerged village of Ban Chiew Lan are relocated and obtain aid and training for their retraining in poultry or fish farming, orchards and vegetables.
Each receives about 3 ha for the plantation of rubber trees and about 200 m² for housing, as well as a sum of 1000 baht / month and per family. The government also creates public infrastructure, schools, water supply, health service, police station, town hall ...
This transformation is accompanied by the movement of fauna on the new islands created by the work: in 18 months, 1,364 animals of 116 different species (tigers ?, elephants, monkeys, butterflies, snakes, spiders ...) are rescued, but 44 die quickly afterwards and many fish perish because the water is now stagnant.
Saeng
The dam
is over there
Even there, before accessing the lake, set back from the road, rise up and emerge from the cliffs and ghostly sugar loaf mountains, karst as it should be, whose relief in a morning mist evokes the famous prints Chinese or Japanese.
From the road, the telephone wires form an orderly tablecloth which bar a little the landscape without being able to do anything about it.
Once through a sort of monumental gate which displays the effigy of the current king, who is none other than the entrance to the Park, here we are a little later just to the east of the dam. This is a usual starting point for mini-cruises on the lake.
Forward on Lake Ratchaprapha,
small inland sea
Embarked in a fast boat on the waters of the lake, we slalom between the islands which are only the upper cap of small ancient summits, whose slightly eroded banks are tinged with light ocher or rust, topped with the thick tropical tuft.
But here, apart from the runoff erosion that makes it dangerous the visit in certain periods, the banks, the cliffs are marked in an absolutely similar way only of the difference between the highest of the levels of the lake and the level current.
This time, the boat is a large longtail boat, noisy and crackling, which follows or crosses some of its fellows loaded with the same dumbfounded tourists.
Often sumptuous panoramas.
The background of the high cliffs creates steep, vertiginous mountainous profiles, uneven successions of vertical spurs with blunt heads, small mountain ranges with sharp relief, still young, which sometimes seem like mountains of hell, impassive challenge to the elements, yet here endowed with powerful erosion capacities.
The exuberant tropical vegetation borders the low banks of princely forests, thick, impenetrable.
From time to time emerge a few gaunt trunks, stubborn remains of submerged forests.
The color of this small inland sea takes on changing tones that go from sea blue to emerald green, without becoming never turquoise. Nor have this magical transparency of coral reefs.
Sometimes, at the end of a bay, tiny testimonies of a tourist presence enjoying the comfort, some accommodation at the foot of abundant and disproportionate slopes, or a too impeccable alignment of mini bungalows on floating pontoon.
Islets, cliffs and sweaty walk
The high jagged barrier would easily be mistaken for the interior wall of a large volcano crater; but we know very well that it is not.
In the maze of promontories and islets, you unknowingly cross a sort of strait flanked by sugar loaf cliffs.
Then to the north, a long arm of the lake stretches like a microphone Adriatic. Our next step is a short walk in the forest, to reach another isolated lake, which seems to be able to be reached only by this way.
The park which we will cross about 1200m is named the "Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary" and warns the visitor to pay attention to wild elephants.
Probably its scale, its endemic flora and the fauna it shelters deserve this somewhat pompous title.
But of the fauna we will only see a lizard so delicate in its movements that it appears motionless and a tarantula (or tarantula?), hairy black ball in the hollow of a tree so deep that we will have to trust the word of our guide.
However, elephants, gibbons, some felines, snakes and many other spectacular animals are staying there, which are in any case hiding. very deeply, during the noisy passage of our group.
Flora, nothing that is quite usual in these latitudes, a jackfruit, a few pineapple, a generous papaya and powerful lianas in which our guide plays Tarzan. The few rattan convolutions appear modest compared to those we have seen in Sri Lanka .
But the forest has that dense and moist majesty that makes splendor tropical.
The ocher path rises 50 meters at the start then follows a course sometimes on a balcony, to descend at the other end to the isolated lake.
Under a rather stifling heat, let us undergo without flinching a very sticky, but very predictable and banal sweating. So let's drink!
Nestled at the bottom of its cul-de-sac handle, a pleasant little pontoon with the possibility of floating accommodation awaits us, on almost mirror-like water as it is immobile.
For a bit, it feels like the entrance to a fjord, with its high surrounding cliffs; but a fjord tropical.
It is now, for the sake of local color, that we get into a sort of boat made of assembled bamboo. She will lead us to the cliff-side cave-caverns, the Pakarang Caves, also called the Coral Cave.
Some prospects before getting there are very estimable.
Cave on lake and limestone draperies
After having climbed a rather steep slope, the dark crevice arises.
We will enter it for a few meters, to see the accumulated stalagmites whose concretions can evoke a stack of small elephants (this which comes naturally to mind in the local context), or that seem to repeat a pattern of layered broccoli.
The stalactites are not left out where we contemplate the drapery in a bundle, as an elegant curtain, or in the form of superb ophelian hair, others, spiky and powerful like those we see for example on Koh Hong , or in spirals folded like English or rabbi's curls on which we would like to shoot ...
There is also a small temple with its offerings.
Swimming with Avatar
The final stage takes us quite the opposite to the south, on a site where several rocky spurs rise above the surface of the water, near the steep slopes of the mountain, in the manner of the James Bond Island.
Their raw and jagged configuration, the spectacular way in which the lush flora has grown into them. Appropriate inspiration is said to be the weightless rocks of James Cameron's famous movie "Avatar".
For the few who dare to swim without having a foot in this deep and calm water, it will be the opportunity to do a few voluptuously lengths refreshing, in their neighborhood.
And there I suddenly find (but yes, yes, it's a bald head ...) another "Proust madeleine", the bland taste of fresh water; precisely the same as that of the water of Garonne that I crossed in my youth at the foot of my village.
It will be harder to get back into the boat, with a rear ladder, the first degrees of which are out of the water ... You just have to see the head of the old man in the bath, ulcerated that it was necessary to use a hoist (photo prohibited !!) to extract it.
... but who despite everything swam in "Avatar" ...
in our lake
a few rocks from the movie "Avatar"
in "Avatar"
However, we still have to do the exact opposite, including forest walking.
first step of the return
In the end of the film opposite, the noise is REALLY that of the long tail boat.
To stop, just click on the current image.
