Bangkok to The River Kwai

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Day 16 (on the big adventure!)

I am expecting today’s blog to be short and sweet as we are just taking the train up to Kanchanaburi to our floating hotel on the River Kwai.

Alarm wakes me up at 4.30am! It should have been 5.30am but I have forgotten to change my clock when we came into Thailand. We manage to sneak a quick breakfast before hailing a taxi to take us to Thon buri railway station to catch the 7.45am train to Kanchanaburi. The tickets cost 100 baht, which is about £2 and the train wasn’t too bad. It even had air conditioning - well you could open the windows!!!!

The slow journey took us through areas of farmland including rice padi fields and sugar cane but the landscape is completely flat so a little uninteresting it has to be said.

After about 3 hours we reach Kanchanaburi and we get off the train, along with all the other backpackers. Stuart’s GPS was telling us that we were still some way away from our hotel - by some way I mean 60kms! We ask taxi driver and he laughs. “Yes. I can take you to your hotel but it’s a very long way!” So we decide to get back onto the train just before it pulls out of the station.

The next stop is the River Kwai - you know, the one that the POW’s built in WW2. We lose our nerve at this stage and get off the train. Surely this must be the right stop. But as we discover from a very nice policeman, we actually have to go to the end of the line at Nam Tok, and the next train doesn’t come through for 6 hours. Oh well. This is a major tourist attraction so there must be lots to see and do here. We walk across the Bridge over the River Kwai and take the obligatory photos and then we visit the Jeath War Museum (I think that should be Death). What a disappointment that is (or should that be dump!)! It was just a building filled with all sorts of equipment abandoned after the war and strange looking dummies representing very thin, ill looking POW’s! 40 baht well spent I say!

After a walk around, it appears that we have in fact seen everything that the River Kwai has to offer. Hang on, is that a real Tiger? Yes, a bloke in a shop has a real, live Tiger and people are having their photos taken with it! Then Stuart stands on a huge Iguana type lizard! Luckily it didn’t bite him. Other than that there is nothing to see and nothing to buy and another 5 or so hours to kill (that’s if the train arrives on time!) So we have lunch in the floating restaurant which is very nice indeed. Am I worried? No not at all! After all that’s what backpacking is about isn’t it? Having an adventure or so Stuart keeps telling me!

Next train scheduled for 16.26, so after another cup of coffee and a visit to the loo where my “She wee” is used for the first time in anger (and it works a treat too!), we wait on the platform. And we wait.... and wait.....and wait! A train arrives from the other direction - that would be the train that should have arrived at 2.27pm - and the conductor informs us that our train will be along in about 10 minutes. That’s Thai minutes of course. They are very, very long minutes here!

Just as we are starting to panic the train appears and we all pile on - by all I mean about 5 of us! We go deeper and deeper into the jungle. We stop at the tiniest stations you have ever seen and the odd person jumps off into the darkness. The last stop on the line is Nam Tok. I had expected it to be a large bustling town, but when we arrive it is very dark and obviously isn’t very big. But as luck would have it, a nice young lady from the hotel is waiting for the train to arrive and drives us to the Boutique Raft Resort.

It’s absolutely fantastic! The hotel is right on the river and our room is a floating raft, beautifully decorated. There is a little swimming pool on a raft (although I think that it is full of river water), and sunbeds and everything! I think that I may be chilling out tomorrow! Told you it was going to be a short blog didn’t I.

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