Haew Suwat Waterfall

I took a trip to Khao Yai National Park accompanying a tour with Tony showing a teacher (Jeff) from BIS Phukhet for a future visiting group to go on a course in January. I thought I should use this opportunity to be familiar with the park myself and its always good to get out of the office. The aim of the this trip was to see some of the sites, and to know where we would do certain activities and to view for potential activities that the students could take part in.

We went for a small hike in the forest wearing some anti leech socks because it is currently rainy season and apparently there are a lot of them this time of year. As this years rainy season has not been too bad, we did not come across any leeches which was good. 

We lost our sense of direction pretty quickly so it is always a good idea to have a GPS navigational device on you. The trails are small as they are often made by the animals in the forest. As we walked deeper into the forest (or so we thought we were) we ended up making a loop back to the car without realising. 

Further into the National Park we stopped at the Haew Suwat Waterfall, which you can view from the top and the bottom. You might think that this is just a waterfall and there is nothing that special about it. Well seeing a waterfall is quite nice as I don't really get to see them in the UK. We were also told that Haew Suwat Waterfall was featured in the film The Beach starring Leonardo Dicaprio, where the characters had to jump off the top of the waterfall in order to get to the other side of the island (Obviously not an island and now you can see why we were surprised to see this was the waterfall they used in the film). Famously the characters Richard (Dicaprio) and Etienne were having a fight about if they should or should not jump but Franciose just showed them how its done and ran through their argument and jumped off the ledge as shown in the photograph. Whether they actually did the jump in real life or not I don't really know because they could have used a stunt double. Having been there and looked down....I was not so sure myself.