Our early start fails to put any kind of damper on our spirits as we rapidly consume an English breakfast and head out once again on our truck, this time to head deeper still into the jungles of Khao Yai. We stop by a flashy resort to pick up a couple, the girl wearing bright yellow wellies and skinny jeans – it’s not just Steve Irwin types who go on this adventure.

As we move through the hills, we suddenly come to a halt, always a good sign. Our guide always announces what we are stopping for, unless it’s plainly obvious. “OK, now we look for the big bird”. Everyone looks puzzled and shrugs to one another as they exit the truck, although I know what’s coming. The guide scans a nearby tree with his binoculars before setting up the telescope and showing us a hornbill. It’s beak, yellow and curved, makes it look prehistoric, and it moves around the tree with a mixture of waddling and bouncing. Large groups come here to feed on the figs, and we spot a second, then a third one. One takes off and swoops down the valley, its wings barely moving as their owner descends to somewhere lower down.

We continue on to a viewpoint looking out over the valley. The sunny weather has brought out hundreds of butterflies and it becomes difficult to move without fear of standing on one. In the distance a call all too familiar to our guides sounds off. Gibbons are in the distance, apes that swing through the trees on their arms. That, together with their loud cries that echo throughout the forest in the morning, makes them the embodiment of Tarzan. We scour the trees, and some of us spot movement, which is surely them, but nothing still enough occurs for the guide to use the telescope. We continue down the road, and the cries are suddenly booming. We can tell we are at the epicentre of this broadcast, and with another tour group fixated on the treetops further down the road we hurry along to join them. And there they are, swinging between and climbing up branches. One mother with a child clinging onto her stomach drops down onto a lower branch, a bit of a crash landing but one I’m sure the baby goes through any day nonetheless. Quite a few of their movements are also rather clumsy, and they do not seem to mirror the nature documentary gibbons that move fluidly. In fact, our guide tells us, sometimes gibbons misjudge the thickness of a branch, it snaps off and something else gets broken.

Suddenly, our guide gets a radio call. He then says to us, “an elephant has just been found down the road, do we want to go see it?”, possibly the most redundant question I’ve ever heard. We speed off in the truck and move through grasslands that evoke Africa. Alas, no elephants are found so we stop by the visitor centre to grab coffee. It’s very reasonably priced, no higher than what it would cost from an outside cafe. A host of wildlife pops up near the centre, and I observe it all with an iced coffee in my hand. First, monitor lizards slither through the stream. They are a little less than two metres long, so it’s no surprise that someone in our group mistakes them for crocodiles. Fortunately for the deer lingering about the centre, they’re not. Khao Yai has two deer; sambar, the ones most used to humans that look like giant goats, and barking deer, small brown deer that are a lot more skittish but still have no qualms about hanging around humans. The reason for this, our guide tells us (you know what, this is getting a little pointless. Anytime I say a fact, just assume it was told by the guide) is that their predators such as dholes and bears are frightened away by humans, so the deer are safe here. My little moment in the spotlight comes when I find a black giant squirrel hanging upside down in a fruit tree. It takes our guide quite a few seconds and a bit of movement from the squirrel before he spots it and fixes onto it for the group to see. And as we’re admiring this oddity, a troop of macaques saunters onto the path behind us. All this almost makes up for us missing our elephant, but not quite, and we head off again.

We stop at the place we were told the elephant was and the guide tells us to wait here. A few minutes later he calls us over, telling us he’s heard an elephant in the forest and we’re going to go in and find it, but we must be very quiet. I hear a rumble, and then leaves move around. It’s definitely there. We place each foot with care as the slope is covered in thorny branches and leaf litter, and then the guide suddenly points down the hill. “There”. Even in the thick undergrowth, it’s impossible to not see the shape of the beast’s back. “Don’t move”, with as much emphasis placed on each word as possible whilst whispering. The elephant stares in our direction. There’s no way he doesn’t know we’re there, and goes back to eating. Things begin to settle down and we begin to speak softly, although the elephant is still only fifteen metres away. A girl from Wales offers to sacrifice herself if the young bull does decide to charge at us, and in return for this noble deed I promise I will come to her funeral. Another member says “take my camera and get some good pictures”. Fortunately for us all, worst does not come to worst and he goes on chewing, peacefully.

I happened to go on this tour twice, something nobody else appeared to be doing, and I was worried that the second day would be a complete repeat of today but actually things were mixed up a bit. The first day led us through a jungle hike in the rain in which we saw a crocodile lurking in the river. It looked so well hidden, and despite my pictures, part of me still says it was a crocodile-shaped log. The second day’s jungle trek featured some of the jungles smaller yet still fascinating inhabitants. Stingless bees, a lizard that changes colour depending on its mood, toxic caterpillars that hide on the underside of leaves which ended up stinging our guide (although he was fine afterwards) and a blue scorpion. One of the things we learned that day is that after mating, the female scorpion kills the male and eats him. Now that’s what I call going out with a bang!

The first and second days both had their highs and lows, and in fact I could have called a tie between the two of them if not for one single event at the end of the first day. So we were just sitting there in our truck, feeling somewhat pleased with what we had seen that day, when we passed something. Standing right by the roadside was a bull elephant, tusks and all. It took me a second to register the fact that this was the wild, not a safari park, and then I scrambled to my feet, along with the rest of the truck. I was right at the back, beside the door, so I already had a front row seat as Jumbo started speed walking towards us, a sort of half-charge. At this point we picked up the pace and went round a bend, passing a parked sedan. Its owners opened the door, perhaps to see what was going on or to stretch their legs – before immediately closing it as five thousand pounds of meat and ivory appeared, and the car instantly went into reverse gear. We stopped at a lake and Jumbo appeared at the top of the hill, though luckily chasing us had long been knocked off his to-do list. He moved over its top in the dim sunlight, plodding away and occasionally picking up a particular clump of grass with his trunk. It all looked the same to me.

Unfortunately, that night was not quite as merry as I thought it would be as most of our group were moving on to somewhere else in Thailand and had to say a quick goodbye as they were whisked off to the train station. Me and a couple from New Zealand were the only ones who remained, although we had plenty to reflect on and discuss.