Everything I wish I knew before visiting Khao Sok National Park
I wanted to write this behemoth of a post because I had a really hard time finding practical information on what it was like to be in Khao Sok NP as a backpacker - this is all obviously based on my personal experience, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt! We spent four nights/three full days in the park and didn't have a motorbike so we relied on walking and guided tours to get ourselves around.
A big thing I didn't expect is how touristy it would be. If you're staying on the main strip (where most hostels are) it's basically tourist central with very little local life happening. You'll mostly see only other foreigners walking around and eating out, and the food is a lot more expensive than other places in Thailand because of it.
Khao Sok ended up being the most expensive leg of the trip, since most activities require you to have a guide in order to access them, even if you can get there yourself by walking or motorbike. There's one main trail that can be accessed by walking from the main town where you can see animals (go early!) and swim in a gorgeous river, but it does hit a point where you can't go any further without a guide (and they're very strict about it). That means none of the waterfalls further along the trail can be accessed without a tour, which was an unfortunate surprise.
There is an entrance fee of 300 baht to get into the park and it isn't included in the tour costs. If you book a night tour and pay the entrance fee, your pass is still valid the next day, but if you want to enter the park again on a third day, get ready to cough it up again.
CHEOW LAN LAKE
One thing I really wanted to do in Khao Sok was spend a night on Cheow Lan Lake in one of the floating bungalows. The only way to visit the lake is with a tour and you have the option of going on a day trip or staying one night. As far as I understand, if you want to stay overnight in the budget bamboo bungalows, you have two tour options - it doesn't matter if you book online or through a travel agency or through your hostel, they all advertise slightly different versions of the same thing and you WILL be lumped in with a group of randoms who booked the same tour through their own avenues. There's also basically no way of determining which set of bungalows you're going to get. A woman on our tour had apparently tried very hard to book a specific bungalow and was taken to a completely different one, which made her rightfully upset.
Anyways, there's the coral cave tour, which is a bit more expensive at 2700 baht (plus another 200 to enter the cave) and the diamond cave tour at 2500 baht (with no extra cave fees). Neither of these tours include the 300 thb entrance fee to the park nor the 40 thb boat fee. We went with the cheaper option, which we booked through our hostel. The itinerary they gave us was simple: Day one, they pick you up from your accommodation, take you to the boat terminal, boat you to the bungalows and feed you lunch, give you some free time to swim and kayak, take you to see the cave, then there's dinner and a nighttime boat safari. Day two, morning safari, breakfast, a 1.5 hour hike through the jungle, then lunch and back to town.
After getting to the boat terminal, we quickly got grouped with 20 other people who would be staying at the same bungalow complex as us and shuffled into a boat. If, like me, you've read any blog posts about how "most travelers skip Khao Sok" or how it's "Thailand's best kept secret," you may be shocked to witness the absolutely massive boat terminal area that feels more like an amusement park full of gift shops and swathes of sunburnt tourists being herded into boats like cattle. The boat ride over to the bungalows was around 45 minutes and absolutely stunning.
Upon arrival at the bungalows, we were informed that we were not allowed to swim without our life jackets (or risk a 5000 baht fine). Not only that, but you're only allowed to swim in the two large sectioned off pens by the rafthouses, each about half the size of a tennis court. The water in these areas was full of dirt and debris from the surrounding logs, making the swimming options rather grim. This was probably the thing I was most disappointed by, seeing as you're surrounded by this beautiful expanse of clear blue water and only allowed to swim in a tiny dirty section of it (in a government-mandated life jacket).
The tour itself was quite disorganized - there were a total of 10 of us thrown together on the tour, but some of the other groups we saw were even bigger than that. The guides didn't really seem to give a shit about any of it and crammed all of our activities into the same day (the cave and the hike), which also happened to be the day it was raining, so I'm not sure why this was the course of action. The "1.5 hour jungle trek" was around 45 minutes, the "night safari" was just the boat ride back to the bungalows (at like 5pm mind you). They told us to be at the dock by 6:45 am for the morning safari but the guides themselves were late and we didn't leave until 7:30, meaning we arrived late to a cold breakfast sitting out on the table covered in bees. In fact, the only thing the guides were on time for was getting us the hell out of the bugalows and back to the ferry terminal, shuffling us off the rafthouse complex half an hour ahead of schedule, only for the boat to run out of gas halfway through the journey.
At a certain point, the whole experience became so chaotic that it became absurd and therefore hilarious. There was no way of locking the rafthouses from the outside so two macaques broke into our bungalow and chewed on a bunch of our stuff, leading us to realize that the white stuff on the mattresses that was there when we first arrived was most likely some sort of monkey saliva/scooch situation. In the morning, we saw two monkeys entering each bungalow they could get into - there was no warning about this from any of the staff.
I want to disclaim that although it sounds like I'm being negative, I don't regret booking the tour in the slightest. Yes, it was janky, yes, there were a lot of things about it that I didn't expect, but if you go into it with an open heart and a sense of humor, you'll be just fine. Getting to be out on the lake, cruising through it in the boat, and waking up to the fog on the mountains made the whole thing worth it alone. This being said, there was a common sentiment among all of the people on the tour in that nobody really expected just how scuffed it would be, which is why I wanted to share my experience. The bottom line is that if you only really care about spending time on the lake for the lowest price possible and are willing to put up with/laugh at a bit of mess, go for it! If you want a highly organized and immersive tour of the lake and prefer it to be an intimate experience, maybe book something else if you can and think about raising your budget.
If anyone else has been to Khao Sok/Cheow Lan Lake on a backpacker budget, I'd love to hear your experience! If not, I hope you've found this informative or at least had a laugh.