Kanchanaburi

The next day we take an open air taxi for the 2.5 hour trip north to Kanchanaburi. In hindsight, it might have been better to pay for a taxi with air conditioning as we all arrive with heat stroke and carbon monoxide poisoning. The hot exhaust air seems to blow backwards into the cab of the taxi and it is at least 45 degrees today.

Our hotel, the Xanadu 2008, is next to the River Kwai in a rural area. Dennis, the English owner takes us to a local eating place for our first meal and orders us his dishes of choice, mostly prawns (not so good for Roger) but delicious. We eat and he just drinks beer.

This is clearly the spot to come for an afternoon swim or a wash and we have a swim in the river Kwai which is surprisingly clear and cool.

While we swim, Dennis drinks whisky with a group of Thai teens and promptly falls asleep in the restaurant on our return. We are tired and still feeling the effects of our road trip and retire early too as we are the only guests that night.

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Sometimes you just have to trust your instinct.

One reason we have come North to Kanchanaburi is to visit Elephant’s World, a sanctuary for elephants who have been rescued from the logging and tourist trades. As a consequence, these are not elephants who are ridden. In fact, Elephants have very weak backs and carrying tourists causes them a lot of discomfort.

The whole place is like an Elephant rest home. They are walked and fed and washed in the river. Later in the day we harvest sweet corn  and prepare sticky rice balls with extra vitamins.

Since elephant logging was made illegal in Thailand, many of those elephants have ended up in Thai cities as tourist attractions. Often they are grossly underfed, like the elephant that has recently been rescued and is being gently rehabilitated with gentle walks, mud baths and good food.

Certainly one of the funnier things we have seen is an elephant drinking from a tap. As the water pours into it’s trunk it gurgles like a big plug hole.

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The next day we head to Thai/ Burma or Death Railway near the border of Thailand and Myanmar. I’ve just finished reading “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” and we watch “The Railway Man” with the kids for a bit of insight.

Whilst also serving as a local train it is also a tourist attraction and after waiting over an hour for the train to arrive, we spend about an hour and a half reaching the Wang Po viaduct where nearly every POW who worked on this part of the line, died.

We disembark here and explore until the train returns about 2 hours later.

The golden Buddha in the cave sits to the side of the railway and overlooks the river.

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People make many offerings including half-smoked cigarettes and bottles of water.

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The trip home is very hot and all the tourists who travelled on the train with us seem to have caught the tourist bus home. Sometimes the heat here is pretty overwhelming and tempers get frazzled. Luckily, there are chihuahuas on the train which is a welcome distraction.

The bridge over the River Kwai, coming back into Kanchanaburi.

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We have prolonged our entry into India as we only have 30 days there, in accordance with the visa and I have booked some cool accommodation later in the month that I don’t want to change, so slicing a few days off the start is easier.

So we spend an extra night in Kanchanaburi then head to a Bangkok airport hotel for our last night before an early flight in the morning.

Categories: Thailand

1 Comment

Narlea · Mon, 18 Apr at 3:02 pm

You are all looking so brown and beautiful. Thank you for letting us know how you all are and where/what you are up to in your travels. Reading about your trip made me feel hot, I am not sure how well I’d do travelling in the heat. Keep on travelling Fogorellis!

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