Kanchanawhatsit and Ayuthingy!

---

Having seen Matt and Sarah off in style we chilled for a little while in Bangkok to recover. It wasn't long though before we were headed out again. We had over a week until our flight to Hong Kong and knew that we didn't want to spend it all in the chaos of the Khao San Road.

We decided to do a mini loop round two towns of interest not far from Bangkok. Both of which had such complicated names that we never seemed to be able to tell people where we were or where we were going!

The first town, Kanchanaburi, was made famous by the WWII film "Bridge Over The River Kwai". It was an old Japanese prisoner of war camp for allied soldiers where many British, Dutch, Australian and other captives were put to work building a railway from Burma to Bangkok. We visited the Railway Museum which was really informative. We learnt about the terrible treatment of POWs at the hands of the Japanese. There were a great many deaths as a result of illness and mis-treatment. We went on to visit the bridge itself which isn't that interesting but we were glad to know all the history behind it.

For our few days in Kanchanaburi we stayed at The Jolly Frog which was really chilled with great views of the river. It had the only restaurant in town that seemed to have customers, so mostly we dined there. We did venture out one night and ended up in a very un-Farang (un-touristy) restaurant which was great as everyone was so friendly and we had delicious BBQ grilled river prawns with a super spicy sauce ... normally the Thai's assume foriegners can't take the heat and tone everything down.

Our next town was Ayuthaya, Thailand's old capital and it's version of Angkor Wat. It is a working city but is sprinkled with world heritage temples. Our base was Baan Lotus which is a super friendly guesthouse in an old fashioned Thai house. It was a great place to chill, especially as we didn't plan to spend too long at the temples having been somewhat templed out lately. Our temple tour consisted of three temples in the morning by tuk tuk (the tuk tuks here are particularly cool), followed by three temples in the afternoon by boat. Our favorites included Wat Mahathat and Wat Chaiwatthanaram (oh yeah - everything here is easy to say!). The first of these had great buddha statues and the second was right on the river and very attractive. Our great day at the temples was slightly dampened by our dinner that evening which screached up to the bar on a moped carried on a tray by the lady passenger. Needless to say it wasn't exactly piping hot straight from the oven!

We went back to Bangkok for our last few days in Thailand and once again braved the Khao San Road. We got to catch up withthe Aussies and Canadians from Laos which was great fun, did a little shopping, did much eating and managed to fit in a cinema visit. We were quite bored by the end of our time in Bangkok and glad to move on. Unfortunately we chose not to learn from our friends Matt and Sarah's mistake and went out and got sozzled with the Canadians on our last night meaning muchos hangover for the flight to Hong Kong the next morning!

---