Kanchanaburi

Us on an elephant

Away from the hustle and bustle of Bangkok, Kanchanaburi is an oasis of tranquility that sits on the River Kwai. We stayed in a beautiful hut right on the river where we could just sit and watch the river flow by.

Our first tour here was to a Tiger Temple where Buddhist monks and tigers supposedly live as one. This was not the temple we experienced though, rather we were guided through to touch several seemingly drugged tigers, while a helper took our photo and we were then pushed onto the next tiger. The tigers were then 'walked' back to their concrete cages but with several of them it was more like dragging as they were so sleepy. It was pretty sad to see, but the one thing that did make the trip worthwhile was the 2 month old tiger cub they had at the temple which we were able to handle and play with. It took a real liking to Holland biting his nipple and refused to let go. The lady worker yelled at him "don't get tiger bite you have to go to hospital".

In Kanchanaburi we also got to do something Becky has been looking forward to ever since she learned she was going to Asia, elephant riding. We were split into two groups to ride the giant beasts. To get onto our elephants we had to mount a high platform and the elephant is then manoeuvered, with amazing obedience to voice commands, next to the platform so we were able to easily hop on. Being the nice people we are we let the rest of the group hop on first and then realised the elephants had 'run out', "don't worry" shouted our tour guide "they bring out another one". Suddenly, booming through the jungle came the biggest elephant we had ever seen, far bigger then the other ones the rest of the group were on. Slightly nervously we mounted the chair construction that had been tied to the elephants back (one might point out, rather sloppily) then our elephant charged off to follow the others. Once we got used to the lurching movement of the elephants walk we began to relax and enjoy the ride. Our elephant was called 'Channa' or winner in English and he was the naughty one who stopped to grab a trunk full of leaved whenever he thought he could get away with it and also managed to snuffle up the most bananas when we fed the elephants at the end of the ride.

After the elephant riding we went bamboo rafting for about half an hour down a calm river, the river was a bit shallow and we had to jump out at a few points to get the raft over the river bed without our weight on it but it was fun.

Unfortunately Kanchanaburi was not always so idyllic and was actually the scene of some of the worst Japanese caused POW crimes of the second world war. The so called 'death railway' that took the lives of over 200 000 people during construction runs right through Kanchanaburi. We took a trip to see the infamous 'Hellfire Pass' and the 'bridge over the river Kwai' to get some history on the atrocities, it was a sobering experience.

Our last day here was spent organising our travel to Chang Mai in northern Thailand, we wimped out of the train as the flights were nearly the same price and 15 hours quicker!

Holland and Becky