There’s something seedy and a bit dodgy about Khao San Road and for some reason the travel agents in that area don’t really instill a lot of confidence in me. It probably has something to do with the shady VIP buses they organise that never seem to go all the way to their destinations and tend to arrive with things missing. So when we decided to get out of Bangkok on a short break, I wasn’t exactly totally confident in our friendly local travel agent.
We had originally planned to do a day trip but as we looked at the various options, escaping Bangkok for two days and a night seemed like the best bet. Three of our friends who were arriving that night decided that they were keen so we decided to do a bit of bargaining. The tour was to take in the River Kwai, a train ride, some museums, a waterfall, Hellfire Pass, elephant riding, bamboo rafting and had the option to give some elephants a bath and visit the Tiger Temple. Pretty much your standard trip out to the Kanchanaburi area. We bargained the guy down fro 950B to 810B each so we were pretty happy with ourselves but still not totally convinced that it’d be a good tour.
I started the day hungover which seems to have bcome a theme over the past month so the early hours of the tour are a blur. The first stop after a long drive was at a cemetery in Kanchanaburi, then a museum, and then I walked along the bridge over the River Kwai and tried not to throw up on it. Time ticked on and I started to feel more normal and enjoyed a train ride before having lunch at our accommodation on a floating house on the river.
In the afternoon we were dropped off at possibly the most pitiful looking waterfall I have come across. We were all looking forward to a swim but the water at the bottom was pretty festy so opted instead to climb up to the top and dunk our heads under the flowing water. My friend Kempy slipped and stacked it hard at the top which was the highlight of the day. Sympathetic friends we are not.
I took in an awesome sunset and then opted for a rare quiet night. A few of us got up early to give some elephants a bath. We had no idea what to expect but were happy to see that the elephants were well looked after. I clung onto the head of mine for dear life and made sure to clean behind his ears.f The elephant guys seemed to have a good relationship with their beasties and it was a pretty awesome thing getting to sit on an elephant as it dunked itself into the water.
We also opted to visit the Tiger Temple which is a sactuary run by monks. It was a pretty strange place. The tigers were pretty out of it, most barely awake and some outright passed out. The guy working there said it’s because tigers are nocturnal. Hrm… not sure about that explanation. It was kind of sad to see so we wandered off to other areas of the park and found a couple of random lions in a cage which was pretty cool.
So over all our mystery tour was really good. Most importantly, it was a booze free event and I was starting to feel normal again.
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