Cheow Lan Lake
Interesting facts
- As the valley flooded, conservationist Seub Nakhasathien led Thailand's first large wildlife rescue, capturing 1,364 animals of 116 species over eighteen months.
- Seub regarded the rescue as a failure because countless animals still drowned, and afterwards he campaigned against further logging and dam projects in Thailand.
- The reservoir covered some 185 square kilometres of what was then Thailand's largest remaining tract of lowland evergreen rainforest.
- The lake took about three years to fill, and some animals had to be moved off shrinking hilltops to save them from drowning.
- A 1995 study found that around 52 fish species had vanished from the dammed river, unable to survive in the still reservoir water.
- Work on the dam began on 9 February 1982, and it was formally inaugurated on 30 September 1987.
- Until the king bestowed its new name, the project was called the Chiao Lan Dam, which is why the lake still carries the old name.
- The dam is a rockfill embankment with a clay core, 761 metres long, holding back roughly 5.6 billion cubic metres of water.
- Three 80-megawatt generators inside the dam give it a total capacity of 240 megawatts of hydroelectric power.
- In the 1970s student activists and communist insurgents kept strongholds in the caves of Khao Sok for about seven years.
Why it is worth it
Chiao Lan Lake, also written Cheow Lan, is a reservoir in the heart of southern Thailand, created when the Ratchaprapha Dam closed the valley of the Khlong Saeng in the 1980s. The name of the dam was given by King Bhumibol Adulyadej and means "light of the kingdom". What the rising water left behind is one of the most theatrical landscapes in the country: sheer limestone pinnacles and walls, cloaked in jungle, standing straight out of green water across more than 160 square kilometres. Thais often call it a Guilin of their own, and the comparison is fair.
The lake lies largely inside Khao Sok National Park, established in 1980, whose rainforest is one of the most extensive in the south of the peninsula. The karst towers around the shore are limestone hills raised by the collision of tectonic plates and worn by rain over millions of years into needles, overhangs and hidden caves. From the water, boat trips reach caves such as Nam Talu, where a stream runs through the mountain, and in the surrounding forest grows Rafflesia kerrii, a parasitic plant with one of the largest flowers on earth. The lake is also one of the last refuges in Thailand of the endangered Asian arowana.
The best way to know the lake is slowly. Scattered among the inlets are floating raft houses, simple bamboo and timber bungalows moored against the cliffs, where visitors spend the night and wake to mist lifting from the karst. Early mornings are the time to watch: the water is still, the long-tail boats are silent, and the towers emerge one by one from the cloud. The dam itself, an earth and rock embankment about 95 metres high, is run by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand and also serves irrigation and flood control.
Getting there
Boats leave from Ratchaprapha Pier beside the dam, in Ban Ta Khun District of Surat Thani Province, where there are a car park, restaurant and shop. The lake is about 49 km from the town of Takua Pa on the Andaman side; Route 401 between Surat Thani and Takua Pa passes nearby. The nearest airport is Surat Thani Airport (URT), about 43 km away. Long-tail boats can be hired at the pier for day trips, and raft-house stays are usually booked as packages including the boat.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Cheow Lan Lake or Rajjaprabha Dam Reservoir, is located in Khao Sok National Park in Surat Thani Province, Thailand. It is an 185-square-kilometre (71 sq mi) artificial lake, inaugurated in 1987 with the construction of Rajjaprabha Dam by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) as a source of electricity.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
9.00000, 98.76667per Wikidata