At the Crossroads
Khao Sok National Park
 

By Thom Henley

Less than a century ago, the largest island in Thailand was covered in an unbroken expanse of tropical evergreen forest. Gibbons in great numbers called from the treetops. Large flocks of hornbills flew through the canopy, feasting on a cornucopia of wild elephants, tiger, leopard and bear roamed the forest floor.

No one living then would recognize that island today. The virgin forest has all but disappeared. The wild elephant, tigers and hornbills are fading from memory, and the last wild gibbon on Phuket Island was put into captivity at the Gibbon Rehabilitation Centre in 1995 – she was without family and believed to be starving.

The fate which befell the incredible biodiversity of Phuket has been mirrored throughout south Thailand – indeed, throughout south Asia. Much of the region, which once supported the greatest botanical diversity on Earth, has been logged over and replaced with scrubland or introduced species: the rubber tree from South America or the oil palm from West Africa. Plantations, human settlement, poaching and unbridled development have taken a terrible toll on the wildlife and resulted in the loss of irreplaceable ecosystems.

Khao Sok National Park is a notable exception to the environmental destruction on much of the Malay Peninsula. Located just 150 km north of Phuket Island, this park and its adjacent wildlife sanctuaries combine to form a vast protected area of 4,000 square kilometres, nearly the same size as Malaysia’s famous Taman Negara National Park (4,362 square kilometres). It is one of the two largest protected areas between Bangkok and Singapore.

Khao Sok may well represent southern Thailand’s last and only opportunity to do something right, to put nature conservation ahead of big development plans, to regulate the flow of tourists, ensuring the preservation of those very attractions sought by visitors. Because of its proximity to Phuket, and because of Phuket’s huge international appeal, the formulation of a management plan for Khao Sok takes on added urgency. More than 2.5 million travellers visit Phuket every year, and neighbouring national parks such as Koh Phi Phi and Phang Nga Bay national parks already receive a combined 5,000-10,000 visitors per day. These numbers represent a dangerous pressure on the local natural environment.

While Khao Sok National Park still has fewer visitors in a year than Koh Phi Phi and Phang Nga Bay see in a single day, things are changing. Whereas the tourist population of Khao Sok has in the past mainly consisted of a few budget backpackers, daytrippers out of Patong Beach are swelling in number. The first large-scale developers have already arrived from Koh Samui and bulldozed a giant swath for a new resort near park headquarters. The Tourist Authority of Thailand (TAT) are launching a multi-million-baht international campaign to promote Khao Sok, and visitor numbers in 1996 are expected to more than double. Park officials, wildlife research scientists, international environmental consultants and local residents are understandably concerned.

Recently, all eight of Khao Sok’s private bungalow operators joined forces with park officials to form the Khao Sok Environment Protection and Tourism Association (EPTA). Dedicated to putting environmental considerations ahead of commercial interests, the Khao Sok EPTA sets an important precedent in trying to gain some measure of community control over the sweeping changes about to come.

But it will take more than a local community association to protect the outstanding resources of Khao Sok. A comprehensive management plan is needed, and this, of course, will require the two predicision-making: time and close cooperation between commercial interests and government agencies. In a tourist-oriented econony where commercial demand dictates policy, it will be a special challenge for scientific researchers, the National Parks Division, the TAT and the powerful tourism industry to take the time, sit down together and work out the best plan for Khao Sok.
Visitor numbers and areas of access will need tight controls. One possibility is a system of management zones, from high-use recreation areas to critical wildlife areas that are strictly off limits.

Fortunatly, there are good working models. Equador’s Galapagos National Park, for instance, restricts the number of visitors allowed onto the island in a given period, requires all tourists to be accompanied by trained park personnel throughout their visit, and keeps some islands off limits to protect critical nesting habitats and endangered species. Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska has an even more comprehensive system. Visitors are transported through the park for wildlife viewing aboard free shuttle buses operated by park personnel so that there can be no feeding, taunting or molesting the wildlife. Back-country permits are issued according to specific zones and for only a few people per zone. In this way, the backpacker is guaranteed a true wilderness experience. More important, the rights of wildlife are not only protected but given priority. For instance, if a family of wolves is dinning in a given area, that entire zone is temporarily closed. If grizzly bears start to congregate near large patches of wild berries, then that zone is temporarily closed to reduce the risks of human-bear encounters. The system works well because there is so much data on park wildlife, including seasonal ranges and use patterns.

Khao Sok presents a far more complex case. Research on individual species’ requirements in tropical forests is scant and, in the case of Khao Sok, almost non-existent. The little study that has been done suggests that the current inventory of confirmed species (48 mammals and 184 birds) is far from complete. True tiger populations are virtual mysteries, and some endemic species (palm langkow, and Rafflesia kerri meijier) are not only unique to this region but greatly endangered.

Tourism, of course, does not always have negative impacts on parks and wildlife. At Khao Yai, Thailand’s first and one of its largest and most popular national parks, a direct and inverse relation has long been recognized between distance from park headquarters and the protection accorded park wildlife. Large numbers of visitors appear to be more effective deterrents to poaching than park patrols. Chances are this is already the case at Khao Sok.

There is too much at stake, however, to leave the park’s future to the whims of chance. Not only is it part of the largest protected area remaining in south Thailand, and the last viable habitat for large mammals including tigers (the most endangered large mammal on Earth), but, more importantly, it is part of our planet’s geography of hope. It’s significance extends far beyond the borders of the Kingdom.

We must avoid the tendency to package and mass-market this destination, encouraging instead the quality of visitors. A daytrip from Phuket is much too rushed to do Khao Sok justice. In fect, the most heavily booked daytrips to Khao Sok from Patong Beach never take the time to enter the park boundaries.

Khao Sok should be marketed as a genuine experience of three to four days’ duration for the serious naturalist, no just another one-day, Tarzan and Jane jungle safari fantasy. It should be a place to lose yourself in solitude in the vastness of it all – to appreciate the magical transition from dawn to dusk and back again, to find a hidden corner of the globe where one can still be dwarfed by ancient and enormous trees, to be spellbound by a rainbow arching over a wilderness waterfall, and to experience that primorial sense of danger at the thought you might come face-to-face with the largest cat on Earth.

Future generations of Thais and foreign visitors won’t look kindly on a generation who squandered this last and best opportunity to set a different course for tourism in southern Thailand. Khao Sok is at a crossroads. It will take diligence, foresight, integrity and real determination to achieve a proper balance here, but it will be to the everlasting credit of those who do it.