Advertisement
Published: January 27th 2008
Edit Blog Post
After a night on the boat, we left on the shuttle to Bangkok at 10am. We arrived in Bangkok around noon and found a taxi to the bus station. At the bus station we found a Dunkin Donuts and I was one happy girl. I've been craving a donut for 2 weeks and I seriously ate 4 jelly filled sugar donuts. Disgusting, I know, but it was delicious! We then boarded our dodgy bus for 2 plus hours...and I say dodgy because there weren't enough seats for people, so some had to stand. We got seats at the very back of the bus and the air conditioner fan thing leaked water on us the entire time. Delightful.
We arrived in Kanchanaburi and booked rooms in the Rainbow Lodge...when we got to our accommodation, we found out they only had the VIP rooms left and so we both got VIP rooms for the standard rate! This time our rooms were literally on the water...they're on a little pier that hangs over the river. There are little floating discos and restaurants that float down the river at all hours, so it's not exactly the most quiet place, but it's definitely different! We
wandered the streets of Kanchanaburi in the evening and came across a fun little night market. I purchased a tank top (very necessary as I only brought 3) and a random assortment of food. First I bought a shrimp sandwhich. I'm not sure what kind of spices were in the sandwhich, but it tasted like ginger and something else with a little spicy kick. I also found hot dog like things wrapped in bacon, fresh pineapple and watermelon and then I came across the most unique stand ever...a bug stand! That's right, milipedes, cockroaches, grasshoppers...every bug you can imagine! And of course I had to try it. I'm only in Thailand once and if this is what the locals eat, this is what I'm eating too. I picked out the nicest looking bugs and the man wrapped them up for me with a great big smile on his face. We wandered back to our hotel and sat outside and ate our dinner. The bugs weren't really that bad...crunchy and salty. I had a few and made William down one (which he spit out) and we left the rest for others to try.
The best part of my whole day
yesterday is discovering we live right across the street from the town's Irish pub. Now let me explain this pub...it's a hut with Guiness signs. Literally a hut. We went over for a couple of drinks last night and met some guys studying in Bangkok from Germany, Canada, Australia and Austria. They ended up playing hold 'em and I walked away with their money (thanks again for teaching me to play poker, Gram!)
We were up early this morning for a boat tour we had booked. Our own little speed boat picked us up and dropped us off first at the JEATH War Museum. The name JEATH is derived from the countries in the WWII Death Railway Construction (Japan, England, America, Australia, Thailand and Holland). The Death Railway (which was the last stop on our tour) was a POW camp which held mostly British, Americans and Australians. Over 16,000 died in the construction of a railway (and specifically a bridge) from Thailand to Burma and the US ended up bombing it and destroying the middle portion of the bridge in 1945. We also stopped at the war cemetary, where 1700 soldiers from Holland, Australia and England are buried. The
tour also took us to a cave, which we were able to explore on our own. We're not exactly sure the significance of the cave, but it had a lot of Buddist relics and statues in it. We were so glad to get out of the sun (it had to be 100 today) and into a cave, but it was still ridiculously hot.
In the afternoon, we headed to a tiger temple to pet tigers! The short version of the story is that the site is a monestary where monks look after several types of animals (goats, camels, buffalo, deer, etc), with their biggest attraction being tigers. The tigers are so used to being around the monks that they are pretty much tame and you can get close enough to touch them and take a picture. It was pretty awesome, the only bummer was that since it's a temple I had to cover my knees and my shoulders...in the 100 degree heat. So I basically roasted for an hour or two, but it was definitely worth it.
This evening we're just relaxing...we'll probably head over to the Irish pub again in a bit for a drink. Tomorrow morning
we're heading to Bangkok for a day before we have to head back to the boat!
More soon! xo
Advertisement
Tot: 0.256s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 7; qc: 56; dbt: 0.0819s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Will
non-member comment
Jealous!
That tiger is awesome!