Cheow Lan Lake Tour From Phuket

Ratchaprapha Dam drowned an entire forest valley in 1987, and the limestone peaks now rising from the water were once ridge tops. Cheow Lan Lake Tour from Phuket tours cross the youngest surface of one of the oldest landscapes in Asia. The reservoir, known in Thai as ทะเลสาบเชี่ยวหลาน, was built for hydroelectric power and flood control, closing the Khlong Saeng river and submerging roughly 165 square kilometres of lowland rainforest. Whole villages were relocated. What stayed above the waterline became an archipelago of more than a hundred karst islands, some rising over 300 metres straight from the surface. The rock is Permian limestone, deposited as marine reef around 250 million years ago, then folded, lifted and dissolved by monsoon rain into the fluted towers that earned the reservoir its nickname, the Guilin of Thailand. Surat Thani province gained a lake; the forest gained a moat. That accident of engineering produced one of Southeast Asia's more improbable conservation stories. Because the flooded basin sits inside Khao Sok National Park and can only be entered from the pier at Ratchaprapha Dam, its shoreline never developed. Floating raft houses, tethered to karst walls and reachable only by longtail boat, took the place of roads. Hornbills still cross the open water in the early morning. Gibbons call from the canopy behind the raft platforms, and the parasitic Rafflesia kerrii, a bloom that can span 80 centimetres, opens on the forest floor inland. Ratchaprapha Dam boat trips therefore move through a working wildlife corridor rather than a resort strip, and the 300 THB conservation fee, charged per foreign adult per entry, funds the ranger stations that police it. The landmarks here are geological rather than architectural. Khao Sam Kloe, the three-pronged formation locals call the Three Brothers, stands near the dam wall and appears on most provincial tourist literature. Further east, the Nam Talu and Diamond Cave systems run deep into the karst, their chambers hung with flowstone and calcite that catches torchlight. Beyond them lies the Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary, which joins Khao Sok to a protected block of more than 3,500 square kilometres, among the largest contiguous rainforests left in southern Thailand. Seen this way, a Cheow Lan Lake Tour from Phuket tour is a crossing between two time scales: the engineered surface finished in 1987, and the Permian reef floor drowned beneath it.