Kanchanaburi

PART I:

WOW! What an adventure Maria and I have ALREADY had! Thursday night we decided we wanted to take a weekend to trip somewhere. So Maria went right to work figuring out where we should go. We were trying to decide if we wanted to take two, one day trips or just one, two day trip. After a little bit of research we chose the city of Kanchanaburi. I had no idea what this city was about but Maria said it’s a quaint little river city with loads of history! In 1942 it was under Japanese control and was a strategic location for both sides of war. It also connected Siam (Thailand) with Myanmar (Burma). One of the most famous monuments is the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway. It was built by the prisoners of war and ultimately caused the death of over 200,000 people. Very surreal.

Anyways so besides the war memorials and history, there is an elephant sanctuary and amazing waterfalls that we wanted to visit. So we said, alright! Let’s do it! On Friday morning, I woke up at 730am (our plan was to leave the apartment by 8 so that we could be on a bus by 830am). Maria wasn’t quite up yet so we actually didn’t end up leaving until 830am. Oh well no worries! We are on our way! We jumped on the BTS to go to the Ekemai bus station. Maria had told me we needed to go to the Southern bus station. Well, silly stubborn me, I thought they were the same thing. Oops. After a 30 min BTS ride we arrived at the Ekemai bus station only to be told, no you need to go to the Southern Bus station. Well eff, Dani should have listened but oh well. Let’s grab a cab and get there so we can catch an earlier bus. We found a very nice taxi man outside of the bus station who said he would be willing to take us to the Southern bus station or Chatchachuk bus station. Ok! Little mistake but let’s do it. We hop in the cab and about 40 mins later, we arrive at the Southern bus station. We walk into the building to find our tickets and ask another man where to get tickets to Kanchanaburi. He points us to a ticket booth and we are on our way. We ask the ticket lady what time the next bus leaves and she says “oh! 12:30”. Well wait, it said on the website that the buses leave every 15 mins! How can the next one leave at 12:30?! Its 9:30!! “oh” she says, “that’s at the Southern Bus station, you’re at the Eastern one”. WELL DOUBLE EFF!!! How did we get here?! We have no clue because we thought FOR SURE this nice man was taking us to the correct place! Well I’m not going to sit around for 3 hours and wait for a bus when it only takes 2 hours to get to where we want to go! We hopped in another taxi to take us to the SOUTHERN BUS STATION!! We said this VERY clearly to him. So he knew exactly where to go. After another 40 min taxi ride we FINALLY arrived at the southern bus station. We had 10 mins to spare so we grabbed some food, went to the bathroom and hopped on the minibus. Only to wait for the thai version of 10 mins  which is actually 40 mins. Should have known… As we expected it took us 2 hours to get there and once we did, we realized all of our troubles were worth it. This place is amazing. The first thing we did was check into our hotel (an awesome room right on the river) and grab some food. Afterwards we rented bicycles and decided to explore the town. First on the list was the Death Railway bridge. Only about 1 km away from our guesthouse so no big deal. We spent 30 mins walking along the bridge and taking pictures.

Next on our list was a cave temple called Koah Poon (I remember it because it sounds like cow porn without an “r”). Someone told us that it was about 10 km away which I know from the Shamrock run is about 6 miles away! That’s no big deal! We can do that! So we jumped on our bikes and headed out. We saw sooooo many animals today!! I was sooo happy! The first ones we saw where two jaguar cubs in town!! They were soooo cute and from the local zoo in town. We got to pet them and good thing they were de-clawed because one smacked me right in the face…. Oops. Anyways along our right we saw these BUNNY COWS!! I don’t know how else to explain it, but you can see in the pictures. After about an hour of riding, we arrived at our destination! This temple was beautiful! We climbed down stairs into the caves to see the buddhas and the temple itself. There are no words to describe the immense sense of wonder sitting in front of a huge golden Buddha 20 meters down into the earth. It was beautiful. Be we got out of there pretty fast cause there were bats flying around. I don’t really like those things :D haha. We continued on our way back to the guesthouse but stopped at the war memorial to take some pictures and pay our respects. Standing in front of a beautiful memorial realizing how many people died in the war you realize that most of the things you think are important, like GPA, getting good grades, or always wearing make-up just isn’t really that high up there in the grand scheme of things. It made me realize how lucky I am to have been born in the United States and have the amazing people I have in my life. I am one lucky girl.

After our stop at the memorial we traveled back home and realized the way we took to the temple and the memorial was just about the hugest detour we could have taken! Oh well it’s an adventure right?! We are now off to get 150 Baht hour massages and drink a cocktail! More to come on elephants tomorrow!!

PART II:

Today was absolutely amazing!! We started off the morning getting the Elephant’s world by feeding the elephants with our bananas that we brought along with us. There were all 6 of the elephants just standing there waiting for us to put the bananas into their greedy little trunks :D. They were soooo cute! We spent the day cutting bamboo trees for them, making sticky rice balls for the elephants with no teeth, and cutting up vegetables for them. Basically a whole day based on what we can feed elephants. But it was super fun. After doing all that, we got a chance to swim with the elephants! A super cool experience! We sat on their necks (which is actually the strongest part of the elephant, not their back) and went in the water with them. For future reference, if you have an opportunity to go “elephant trekking” please please please don’t go. These are camps that mahouts (elephant owners) create so that they can just earn money. They don’t care about the health of their elephants or do they make sure they get the food and care they need. They work them until they are too old to work anymore and then they don’t care. That’s when the lucky elephants get taken in by places like elephants world so they can live a part of their life happy and cared for. This was an amazing experience and I am so glad I had the opportunity to interact with elephants that I know are treated right and with love. If you want any more information about them you can go to www.elephantsworld.org!