Advertisement
Published: September 22nd 2008
Kanchanaburi
So I was at dinner with some of my friends and we got to talking about how we could use some time away from school. When you live where you work, it becomes very important to get away once in awhile. I hadn't left school at all yet, I teach Joy Club (special Saturday class) on the weekends so that kept me here most of the time. This time though, I decided I needed to get away. We settled on Kanchanaburi because it's close, cheap, and beautiful. I wound up being the only guy on the trip, haha. Anyways, we took the bus for close to three hours for about 120 baht I think (less than five dollars!) and stayed at a guest house for about 300 a night, or about 10 usd.
Our destination in Kanchanaburi was Erawan National Park (read about the park
here .) We got to drive motorbikes all the way there which was awesome (and scary at first). Since we got our teacher cards a little while ago we got in for the thai price (60 baht) as opposed to the 200 it costs for tourists. The park itself was pretty much
one of the sweetest places I've ever been to. I love waterfalls but have never been to one I could walk inside of. The Erawan Falls are divided into seven "steps" or seven major waterfalls. It's all one giant connected waterfall but there are seven main areas.
The first fall had two large caves that you can go inside. The water isn't very cold at all, so it's actually very refreshing. There are fish that live in the water that tend to nibble on your feet, so that's a little...weird. We met a group of teachers from the Bangkok Grace International School there, so that was cool. I ran into a girl I'd gone to Thailand with on a missions trip with my freshmen year at Liberty and hadn't really talked to at all since then. Definitely a random, but cool encounter.
About halfway up the falls, I got separated from the group and started climbing up one of the waterfalls by myself. You can actually climb up the fall itself, it's formed like little steps in some places and is made of pretty rough limestone so it's easy to get a grip. I got over
top of one of the falls and ran into pretty much what I see as the perfect place. It was this beautiful blue pool of water at the base of one of the smaller falls, I was the only one there. It was like something out of a movie. I hung out there until we had to go, I definitely hope I can go back soon.
We checked out the cave of the Buddhas on Sunday, we had to return our bikes at 10:30am so there wasn't a whole lot of time to explore. Overall, it was an awesome weekend. An added bonus was seeing my face on a billboard advertising GES, we saw it on the bus on the way home. I'll definitely get a picture of that up soon.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.095s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0552s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
