August 10th, 2009
mid way home…
Today we are headed home- I am currently in the Tokyo airport, and time is all upside down as we are heading back in time through the time zones. I am going to write about what we did yesterday on our last day in Bangkok. We were up bright and early at 5:50am (which was painful, to say the least, due to our long run of very late sleep in mornings). Mr Sawang was to pick us up at 7am for our day trip to Kanchanaburi. We were able to have breakfast early and were on the road by 7:10am.
Our first destination was the floating market. I have seen plenty of pictures of this and we thought it might be a little “touristy”, but since we were her should at least check it out to say we went. We stopped at a small road side area and were sat down and given a young green coconut with a straw. All these weeks in Thailand and i think Russill was the only one of us who had actually tried this delicacy. I did not care for it, I am pretty sure BK drank all of hers..but the rest if us just sipped. It was about 9am and too early for anything but coffee in my opinion. So 2,500 baht later ($75 USD) we are on a mid sized longtail boat headed down a narrow river or klong/canal or something. Not sure exactly what we are doing at first–has the potential to look just like any one of the other longtail boat rides we have taken. There are lots of small “homes” aongside the water and not too much later, we pull up to a water side shelf filled with similar kinds of things we see at the markets and on roadside stalls. There is a gal kneeling among the stuff and is showing us things and wanting to make deals and haggle prices. So this is what it is…a floating market just like it is supposed to be. We go to several more, they seem spread out and sporadic and I am thinking this is not quite like the pictures, then we go round a few more corners and WOW–there are zillions of boats andf they are all jammed together going all different directions. Some are tourists just like us, looking and shopping, others are people selling their wares and food is everywhere. I got a huge plate of mango sticky rice for 70 baht (this will be our last of our journey–so sad!). Hard to describe, hopefully the pictures will show what a nuthouse this was. There were all sizes of boats and it was like bumper boats to the extreme…I also think that there is a future profession for me as a good percentage of the boats were being manned by elderly ladies with oars. Our boat was run by a young guy with a motor, but those ladies with the paddles were doing just fine and in some cases maybe better than the bigger boats with engines.
Our next destination was the train station in Kanchanaburi. We missed the train so had to bypass the first station and head to the next one so as to catch it there. We made it in plenty of time, and manned with our third class tickets in hand (100 baht), we await our chariot. The train pulls up and I am thinking–what are we doing?? It is very rattletrap and scary looking–some we know would call this the chicken train–although there are no official chickens. It is the state run train and we get PLENTY of stares as we board and start our search for seats. Our tickets only guarantee us a spot standing–but if we can find a seat, we are welcome to it. As luck would have it, there are seats for all 5 of us–just not together! Oh well…at some point on this journey, we realize this will be a day where we ride in planes, trains and automobiles all in ONE day.
The train drops us many stops later at the end of the line. We hop off and trusty Mr Sawang is there waving for us–he shepards us to a small, affordable place for lunch. Yummy! We then spend a few minutes playing in a very cool waterfall.
Now we are on our way back to Kanchanaburi to where the train started so we can go the WWII museum and to see the bridge over the river Kwai. Lots of sad history to see here–we walk the bridge (reconstructed) and take the photo ops.
Then we all load up back in the car–it was 5pm and we need to be heading to the airport…
