Khao Kuap (6)

2006: at the BK herbarium in Bangkok I found a specimen without label, but clearly belonging to the smilesii/thorelii group. This is a photo: pic1. The plant is said to be coming from Kao Kurap (1600mt), Korat, where it was found in 1929. While Korat is the old name of Nakhon Ratchasima, it was impossible to find any Kao Kurap in the area. But we know it’s at least 1600 mt high, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to locate.

2007: I paid a visit to Mr. Pooma of the BKF at the beginning of this year’s trip. That was quite useful. I was looking for any good suggestion about the lost places that I hadn’t been able to find until then. When I told Mr. Pooma if he knew anything about “Kao Kurap or Kuap, in Korat”, he said “I know Khao Kuap, it’s in the Trat province, but I didn’t go there, as I was told that it’s too dangerous because it’s near the border, so I didn’t even insist, I just gave up without asking more anything more about its precise location”. That was the first big help, as until that moment on this website you could only find the red spot corresponding to Kao Kuap in the north-east map, near Korat, in a completely wrong place (Trat is in the center)!

The second revolutionary help came from the web. After a long time spent on a few search engines, I found a PDF document – that I even printed, as useful as it was – about a bird called Garrulax ferrarius. You are now wondering how the sweet Garrulax can be so helpful for a Nepenthes enthusiast. Well, a large part of this document is all devoted to how bloody difficult was finding such a lost place like Khao Kuap! These guys did with this bird the same thing I’m doing with Nepenthes of Thailand, and made me save a lot of time. I’ll show you here the most important lines. The bird was “collected by Hugh M. Smith at Kao Kuap, said to be near Krat, in south-east Siam on 27 December 1929 (Riley 1930). (…) The Thai-Cambodian border has been more or less off limits to biological exploration for the past three decades due to armed conflict. Even though the conflict has now ceased, most areas still remain unsafe to enter because of the continued presence of land-mines. (…) Riley (1938) stated that Kao Kuap belonged to ‘a group of mountains the main chain of which extends eastward into Cambodia’. Under locality listings, Riley says ‘Kao Kuap is a mountain near Cambodia, east of Krat’. For Krat he says ‘Town on the Krat River’. He also gives an alternative spelling (Trad). The latter is well known as the town of Trat, from which the south-easternmost province of Thailand takes its name. (…) Consultation of an older map (RTSD, 1934) wherein Khao Kuap is clearly labelled (in Thai script), at 12º23.5'N 102º48.0'E, has now resolved the uncertainty. (…) The summit of Khao Kuap lies inside Cambodia, the actual border being indicated ca. 1 km to the northwest, at the extreme NW edge of the summit ridge of Khao Kuap, at roughly 1,100 m. This, the highest point on the Thai-Cambodian border, which runs north-east to south-west at this point, bears the Khmer name Phnom Thom (Phnum Thom) on RTSD (1971)”. A useful map of the area is also included in the document.

During a visit to Ko Chang, an island near Trat, I asked my friend Ning if she knew Khao Kuap. She had never heard that name, but we saw on the province map how the place I was looking for had to be quite close to the Khlong Kaeo n.p. And Ning resulted to be a good friend of the superintendent of that park. She told me she was going to ask him about this Khao Kuap. But a couple of days later she referred by email how not even the superintendent had never heard that name. So my trip went on in the south, hoping to find in the mean time something more about Khao Kuap.

And in fact while I was in Surat, during my famous great brainwave (read the blue lines in Kanchanadit), I found out that the plants at Khao Kuap were not growing at 1600 mt but at 600 mt! That’s quite important, as it means their habitat must be similar to the Ko Chang Nepenthes habitat (shaded by trees on the steep side of the mountain) and completely different from that of N. smilesii in the north-east (open area on the top of the mountain), as the flat top of Khao Kuap is at about 1100 mt. That also means that the plants at Ko Chang and those at Khao Kuap are probably the same species (something I realized only after having seen once again the dry specimen in the light of all my new clues). I also hoped that being not on the top of the mountain, which lies in the Cambodian territory, but on its side, the plants were growing in a safe area on the Thai side of the mountain. More precisely, about 500 metres from the Cambodian top.

After about ten days I went back to Trat. With another 60 bat of minibus I reached a village 10 km from Khlong Kaeo. A kind guy gave me a lift to the national park with his motorbike. One kilometre before the park we went through a frontier post, complete of a couple of soldiers. All the areas near the border, including national parks, are taken quite seriously here. At the park headquarter, even if the two girls there couldn’t speak English, I was told in some way that the superintendent was going to be back at 3:30. It was now lunch time. While asking about Khao Kuap, that of course no one knew, I find on the wall a wonderful, military detailed map of the national park. With that one and with the map used by those guys to find their Garrulax ferrarius, it didn’t take long before I compared the lines of the border and then found the exact location of Khao Kuap. On the military map there was no name for that mountain, only an altitude, exactly the same altitude given on my PDF document. In the mean time girls and boys in the office were discussing with animosity in Thai about the dubious existence and location of Khao Kuap. Once they saw the spot I pointed on their map, we all realized that unfortunately the mountain was just out of the national park boundary, maybe a couple of kilometres south of it. I called Ning to let her talk with the staff and find out if there was any way to reach that place or to find someone who could bring me there. Of course right there I was asked by the staff to take my time, to sleep there, to relax and the following day someone would have brought me up to Khao Kuap. Yeah, sure. I knew how these things were going to work, so I asked exactly which day and what time we were supposed to go there. In this way they couldn’t put on a side the problem, and they called the boss by phone to ask how to move. And things changed. He told them that being the mountain out of the park boundary, it was also out of their responsibility, and I had to ask the Forestry department in Trat. A young boy from the staff was incredibly kind in bringing me back to Trat for free with his motorbike (60 km!). In Trat I was going to ask him where the Forestry office was, but he brought me there directly, also working as a translator. All the staff discussed with him for a long time. They had never heard about any Khao Kuap or any Phnom Thom. But they saw how my friend was sure about that and they only worried about the usual main problem: the bombs buried all along the border. I have to say that with Khao Kuap I was particularly lucky with people, as they were all incredibly busy trying to help me, avoiding their usual “no mokao, sorry” and general laughs. I think that everything changed as soon as at the park headquarters I asked one of those guys to call Ning at the Ko Chang national park. I guess she underlined how I was doing a very serious thing, even if just related to mokao moken ling, and how the tracks I was following were not casual but they were the result of a specific research. Until the last minute everybody tried to help me even if I was trying to do something more or less impossible. I’m very thankful. Going back to the Forestry staff, they were going to tell me that I had to go to the Army office, but then they thought that it would have been easier if they would call the Army themselves. The result was quite predictable, but I had to arrive up to the hearth of the problem to consider my day done, I wanted to touch the brick wall in front of me to see my mission accomplished. At the phone I was told by the Army that they couldn’t let me go there in no way. The stripe that is covered with mines is in fact 3 km large and goes random in and out the border line. So you have bombs both in the Thai and Cambodian territories, but of course no one knows exactly where. Going 600 mt from the border is then not possible until the area is made clear. After all Kerr collected that specimen in 1929 (the same day Hugh Smith collected the Garrulax! Can you believe that?! They went there together!) while the bombs were placed there only at the end of the Seventies. Anyway, the pitcher plants at Khao Kuap are more than safe.