Today we went on a tour… got picked up from our hotel at about 7:30 by a sup’d up mini van with super tinted windows, a sound system complete with subwoofer and flashy lights inside!! There were 4 other people on the tour, a couple from Australia and a couple from Japan. We headed straight out of Bangkok to the southwest and reached the floating market about 2 hours later… the floating market is exactly as it sounds, a market on boats! Well, partly. Apparently it’s way more touristy than it used to be, but it was still cool to see, and we got a free ride in a motorised long boat. After that we headed to an elephant place where you could get rides and feed the elephants, but Abe and I opted out of that to save money, and it’s also something we’ll do in Chiang Mai later. After a brief stop at a Thai craft place where we got to watch people carve some amazing designs out of wood, it was time for lunch on a boat (a non-moving one, more like a barge) on the River Kwai (or Kwae) – very picturesque setting and yummy food as usual! After lunch we took a longboat ride (very fast!) down the river to the Kwai Bridge (originally bombed by the allies in WWII and then re-built), and got to see lots of cool house boats. The last stop for the day was the tiger sanctuary, where the tigers live with monks and are tame enough for people to pat and have photos taken with them!! It was amazing to get up close to the big cats, and because we were there at the end of the day they were waking up as it was feeding time – we were just hoping the food wasn’t us!!
We got back to the hotel pretty late so grabbed a quick Pad Thai (LOVING the Thai food) and headed to bed to get a good sleep so that we can tackle the overland border crossing to Cambodia tomorrow.
