Restless Soul - Alex Archer [7]
“Zakkarat,” he repeated. “Zakkarat Tak-sin. Your guide to Tham Lod Cave.”
Luartaro reached for Annja’s hand and swung it as if he was a child. He was smiling, too, obviously happy to be off to the spirit cave, as the pamphlet called it. His skin felt warm against hers, and she intertwined her fingers with his and reveled in his boyish attitude.
With them were two other couples, one in their twenties—on an ecohoneymoon, they’d proudly announced. The other was a middle-aged Australian pair who were on their third trip to Thailand.
“Comfortable shoes, all?” Zakkarat looked at everyone’s feet.
“Comfortable shoes, yes,” Luartaro replied. The others nodded in agreement.
“Five, six miles to the cave,” Zakkarat said. “Two hundred baht now, more later for extras. Not much more. This is one of the cheapest trips for tourists.”
Luartaro was quick to pay the guide, whispering to Annja that the pamphlet said there would be a charge to enter the cave and for the raft.
After passing out small water bottles, Zakkarat led the way. He had a quick gait and was nimble, ducking under branches and stepping over ruts, and Annja put him closer to thirty for it. He chattered as he went, pointing first to the tops of the mountains and mentioning the mist. They were unlike other mountains she’d traipsed through, certainly unlike the familiar Rockies and the mountains she and Luartaro had combed through for the ancient penguin remains. These peaks had been weathered away into twisted shapes and odd-looking knobs largely covered by jungle. They were beautiful and ghostlike in the mist.
She regretted not bringing her camera. Luartaro wasn’t taking as many pictures as she would have, or from what she deemed the proper angles. The path Zakkarat took was wide and flat from the traffic of countless tourists. To the sides stretched swaths of dark green moss, still shiny from yesterday’s rain.
Though practically everything was green, there were remarkable variations, Annja noted. Some of the leaves were so pale they appeared bleached bone-white by the sun. Others were a deep green that looked like velvet. Shadows were thick near the ground where the large leaves reminded her of umbrellas. If there were patterns to the colors and light, she couldn’t discern them—everything was a swirl.
Had someone taken a picture of the scenery and turned it into a jigsaw puzzle, it would be one of the most difficult ever to assemble, she thought.
Annja listened intently to hundreds of tiny frogs that chirped like baby birds. After a mile, she spotted a fence far to her left, and a tilled field beyond. On the opposite side the ground rose at a steep angle, and she wondered if there were caves beneath.
A bit farther along, the Australian man drained his water bottle and looked at his watch. “My feet are hurtin’, Jennie,” he said. His wife smiled sympathetically and pointed to a thin river that meandered out of the fields to their left. It widened as they kept walking, eventually paralleling the path, which had started to narrow.
“More than two hundred caves in Pan Mapha in Mae Hong Son alone,” Zakkarat announced. He numbingly rattled off facts about their length in meters and feet with so little inflection that Annja guessed he’d been repeating his speech and leading tours so long that he was bored by it all. “This cave we go to, a most popular spot. Tham Lod Cave does not need climbing equipment. Easy on the feet, yes?”
Good for most of the tourists, Annja thought, wishing for something a little more adventurous and taxing.
The path narrowed to the point they had to walk single file, and Annja noted faded signs tacked on trees written in Thai and English advertising a bird show. They’d obviously been posted years earlier, and she wondered if the show still continued and,