For a year or so, I had been fobbing off requests from 5 year old Felix to go camping – camping in Thailand just seemed too logistically difficult, and the thought of cooking Mama noodles over a camp fire for dinner was not a particularly appealing one.  The only easy options I had found were camping in a resort setting, which seemed to defeat the purpose of camping.

Then I remembered that I was in a country where tourism is a primary foreign income earner, and I started looking on the internet for Thai ‘adventure’ travel companies.  I found Wild Thailand (www.wildthailand.com) and Khun Duangkamol had soon organised a hassle-free ‘camping’ holiday in Doi Inthanon National Park for us in October.  When I say ‘hassle-free’, I mean it – we were picked up in a minibus at the airport and looked after by our driver and tour guide for the next 5 days – I didn’t have to organise a thing.  We stayed in Chiang Mai in a hotel for the first and last nights, and had 2 nights staying in the National Park.

Our tour guide was Jakkrapan Saengpayom, or  Khun Jack, who I can’t recommend highly enough.  He has been a tour guide for Western tourists for 30 years or so, is great with children, and is interesting to talk to about Thai politics and his experiences working for the American Army during the Vietnam War.

Doi Inthanon National Park does not fit with the Australian idea of a national park being untouched wilderness – there is plenty of private cultivated land scattered throughout the park – but it is very beautiful and we went on some spectacular jungle walks, which were the highlight of the holiday.  We also visited a couple of markets, a weaving village, and went up to Doi Inthanon itself, Thailand ’s highest peak.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get much of a view because of cloud, but the forest around there was very lush.  From Chiang Mai, we did some of the more standard tourist things, like elephant riding, the zoo and an orchid farm.

Felix’s long-awaited jungle camping did not come to pass, because it was so wet and muddy that we had to camp in the grounds of the National Park bungalows.  After a suitable period of sulking and being told tales of dangerous nocturnal jungle animals, he recovered, and both children were very excited about staying in tents, even though it rained nearly all night and I spent the night worrying about whether we would have to move into one of the bungalows.  The second night we spent in a fairly basic but clean and comfortable bamboo hut in a spectacular setting on the side of a mountain between a rice field and a river.  Khun Jack chargrilled chicken for us for dinner, which we ate with sticky rice on our bamboo terrace while watching the stars (a rare sight in Bangkok ).