Kanchanaburi - Day One

I decided to give myself a treat and have a leisurly morning heading off to Kanchanaburi for the weekend. Lucy and Eleanor were off to Cambodia and after they left, I had a breakfast of potato salad, barbequed ribs and pinapple and headed upstairs to pack for my trip.

The pack that I brought with me is enormous and much too big for a weekend trip. Unfortunately, the other backpack that I brough for day trips is a little too small for a weekend trip. So while I was able to bring a flash light, a bike lock and a few changes of clothes, I had to leave without a towel or a bottle of shampoo (the shampoo I am regretting now as soap renders hair an awful mess).

I left the house around 10:30 and flagged a cab for the Southern Bus terminal. Upon hearing my atrocious pronounciation of the name of the Southern Bus terminal, the taxi driver, turned to me and said, "Southern Bus Terminal?" After that he spent the drive asking me about my stay and teaching me to say, "I stay in Thailand four months," and "I go to the Southern Bus terminal" in Thai as well as talking about his love of Thailand and his ideas about the Muslim violence in the south.

As soon as we stopped at the bus terminal, my door was opened and the man standing there asked me where I was going. When I replied, he pointed to the nearest bus and helped me out of the cab. I boarded the bus and settled in just as it began to pull out of the station.

Three hours and only 67 bhat later, I got off the bus at the Kanchanaburi bus station. My Rough Guide lists all of the recommended guest houses and notes that if you call them, they will pick you up at the bus station for free. I walked past all of the taxi drivers offering to drive me for 50 bhat and headed to the nearest 7-11 with a pay phone. Settling on the guest hosue that was said to have "some of the cheapest accomodation in town," I called them up, asked for availability and was told that someone would be on their way. Ten minutes later, realizing that "in front of the 7-11" could put me almost anywhere in town, I called them back and reaffirmed my location and the color of my shirt. A few minutes later, a petite Thai girl pulled up on a motor scooter and we were off.

I had never ridden on the back of a motor scooter and had no idea how to hold on. It seemed inappropriate to wrap my arms around the driver, as I'd seen many Thai women do, so I held on to the handle on the back of the seat and just hoped that we wouldn't hit anything or make any sharp turns.

The C&C Guesthouse was down a small dirt road leading down a hill. As with most of the guesthouses I’ve stayed at so far, it had an adjoining restaurant, in which I met the woman who ran the guesthouse who led me to my room. The cheapest accommodation was 70 bhat (less than two dollars) a night for a basic private room on the river. From the restaurant, we walked across a grassy courtyard and over a rickety wooden bridge. The shared bathrooms consisted of three separate stalls, each with a toilet, shower and sink on the right just before the bridge. The bridge led to two separate floating houseboats, each divided into three of four rooms, each with a chair out front and a small walkway on which you could sit and hang your feet in the river. My room contained a hard, thin mattress on the floor with a mosquito net and unfortunately, my room was sans the promised fan, but I was told one would be brought to my room.

Anxious to be on my way, I emptied my bag of my clothes and set off to rent a bike to visit the local war cemeteries. As I walked back into the restaurant, the woman who had shown me my room asked where I was off to and told her that I wanted to rent a bike for the afternoon. Hearing my plans, she gestured to three dilapidated old bikes in the parking lot and said that I could use any of her bikes for free. Having had a quick conversation with my British neighbors about the bikes, I knew that they were yours to rent “if you could get them to work;” however, I didn’t want to insult my new host and so I graciously thanked her and climbed onto the one bicycle with an intact chain. She smiled and waved me off as I made my way up the dirt hill to the main road.

The bike was an older style ladies bike with the long curved handles. The chain was functioning, but something was causing the petals to skip a beat with each turn. The seat was also quite painful and the brakes were barely functional at best. I told myself that this was all a part of the adventure, but had doubts that this bike would make it to the road, much less all the way to the cemeteries I hoped to visit. To my surprise, the bike held up… for as long as it took me to find the nearest bike rental shop. I quickly locked up my ancient relic and headed off on my nice new mountain bike, a mere 30 bhat lighter.

Kanchanaburi is home to many historical sites, the least of which being the infamous Death Railway and Bridge over the River Kwai. The city also contains two cemeteries for the thousands of POWs and paid laborers who died in its construction. The larger of the two is in the center of town across from the train station; the smaller one being off to the west of the City in more of a rural setting. Enjoying my new freedom of mobility, I headed west, into rural Thailand to the smaller of the two.

Just across the bridge, the town gives way to rolling fields of bright green crops against a backdrop of mountains, dotted with the occasional open air restaurant characteristic to small Thai towns. The two lane road was paved and hosted a steady, if slight, stream of traffic and the occasional dog warning me from veering too far off my path.

After about 20 minutes, I came to the cemetery, but rode by because I wanted to see the cave temple which would close before the cemetery. The cave was a natural cave filled with Buddah images. I enjoyed the natural beauty of the cave, but most likely missed out on a lot of the specifics as the 7-year-old guide of the group in front of me kept of a continuous stream of chatter.
From the cave, I headed back to the cemetery.