Mr. Selfish and I had a week allocated for the western part of Thailand. We landed in Phuket but knew that we had to get out of there as soon as possible. We stopped in Khao Lak for a couple of days in order to scuba dive at Richelieu Rock and then we headed to Khao Sok to spend a couple of nights in a tree house and one night in a raft house. Khao Sok is a national park encompassing 738.74 square kilometers. It is pretty rustic and not yet overrun with tourists, which means that there are no chain hotels in Khao Sok.

Mr. Selfish has been expertly collecting airline and hotel miles and points since September 2011, which has enabled us to stay at some really nice hotels during our selfish year. Because we could not use any points for Khao Sok, I was left in charge of planning the accommodations.

For our tree house, I booked the Bamboo Orchid Tree House at Khao Sok Tree House. It had air conditioning and an outdoor rustic bathroom, and cost 4,000 baht ($136 USD) per night.

According to the website, there are very few mosquitos since the tree houses are 20 meters up in the air. I found this to be accurate. However, the website didn’t say anything about huge rats. As Mr. Selfish was freaking out about the possibilities of leeches in Khao Sok National Park, a huge black rat came into our tree house and glared at us for about 10 seconds. We informed the staff, and they sprayed some kind of licorice smelling repellant in our tree house. The rat didn’t come back but we heard rats (or something) fighting on the roof throughout the night.

The next morning, I heard the sound of rushing water, which I thought was the staff watering the plants. When I went to turn on the water at our sink, none came out. I looked over our bathroom ledge and saw that a pipe had become disconnected and water was spraying everywhere onto the ground. A staff member quickly crawled outside of our tree house and reconnected the pipes.

Unfortunately, the tree house was pure luxury compared to the raft house on Cheow Lan Lake. I had tried to book a nicer raft house but everything better was already booked. I ended up booking a 2 day/1 night tour with Khao Sok Tree House for 2,500 baht ($85 USD) per person. The tour itself was nice, but the raft house was a nightmare. We somehow managed to get the worst looking raft house out of all of them. Our raft house was dirty, smelly, and dilapidated.

The floating pier to get to our raft house for full of gaps and protruding rusty nails. The bathroom was so gross that no one in our tour group of about 20 dared to shower.

This is clearly the last time that Mr. Selfish will trust me to book our accommodations. He still laments about how horrible the raft house was and how wonderful the Conrad Koh Samui was.